


Apotheosis II

by OneMoreAltmer



Series: Oblivion: Taviverse [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Genre: Anal Sex, Bathing/Washing, Bondage, Cults, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Murder, Oral Sex, Redemption, Rope Bondage, Threesome - F/M/M, Vaginal Sex, Vampire Sex, ghost - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:45:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 45,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14772494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneMoreAltmer/pseuds/OneMoreAltmer
Summary: Methusiele, formerly known as Tintaviel, rises through the ranks of the Dark Brotherhood, a murderous cult whose bonds are built and maintained sexually. When it all falls apart and is revealed as yet another case of her serving as the tool of Mephala, will she finally listen to the whispers she hears in the Imperial City?"Post nubila, Phoebus." - (After clouds, the sun.) Roman proverb





	1. The Orange Man

I had been a successful tomb raider and an alchemist.  I had been the Arch-Mage and Champion of Cyrodiil.  I had been consort to the man who should have been considered the greatest Emperor since Talos even though he had not survived his own coronation.

Now I was a murderer.  After months of avoiding the invitation, I had killed worthless little Rufio in a fit of grieved fury over my own losses, and in so doing I had fulfilled a contract from the Dark Brotherhood and implied my willingness to join their ranks.

What was most horrible about it was the way in which I continued to feel perfectly justified.  Rufio had not _deserved_ everything Martin had sacrificed, everything I had sacrificed.  I was within my rights, if I had to stay alone in the world my love had abandoned, to scrub it clean of beings who only profaned it and made a mockery of his gift.

That was the kind of remembrance I had to offer him.  It made me more keenly aware than ever that beneath my Altmeri veneer I was myself a daedric spirit, forged by Mephala, the queen of strife and death, as she had tried to tell me.

And that, in turn, meant it didn’t matter any more if the Dark Brotherhood found me again and took me into their dread circle.  At least that would give me someone to talk to.  Most of my other friends were dead.

I’d returned to my dreary little room in the Inn of Ill Omen after the killing.  As I closed the door and slipped my chameleon ring from my finger, I heard the low, cold voice that had issued the invitation months before, laughing at me.

“Finally, Tintaviel!  You do like to keep your men waiting.”

He removed his own chameleon spell, and I could see him regarding me with clear pleasure.  He was a little bit shorter than me, as was not uncommon – somehow the aura of menace he carried had made me remember him as taller than he really was.  Only his pale face was visible:  otherwise he was swathed in black from head to toe, including his gloved hands.  His features, though clearly human, were not easily defined by race, and were almost delicate enough to be elven.

But I was not the same girl that he had first propositioned:  I was much harder now.  “I would not say that you _waited,_ Lucien.  You pursued with some relentlessness.”

“Did I?”

I held out the dagger, my Blade of Woe, still streaked crimson from the deed done.  “How else would it keep finding its way home to me after all the times I have left it behind somewhere?”

He smirked.  “Ah.  Perhaps it has an enchantment that you have failed to notice.  Surely you do not think that I have nothing else to do but follow one woman all over Cyrodiil.”

“I found the note you left on that Mythic Dawn girl in Leyawiin.  Thank you so much for leaving the body in my room, by the way.”

“No one thought less of you for it.  I knew no one would care about a dead cultist.”  He raised one hand in a delicate wave.  “Very well, perhaps I have looked in on you from time to time.  Perhaps I have even protected you once or twice, as one would any new hatchling.  The really promising recruits are so rare, you see, even when the world is full of mediocre killers.  Take the Leyawiin girl, for example.  Obviously she had the intent, but she was horribly unaware of her surroundings.” 

His mouth spread into that cold smile that did not reach his eyes.  “Then again, so were you, that night.  But you were weary from all that effort in saving the world, and I forgave you the transgression.”

I shuddered.  “Kind of you.”  He inclined his head politely.  “But what made you think I was promising?  Why have you insisted on me?”

“My dear, look at yourself.  You are _aglow._   You rejoice in the deaths of the unjust and unworthy, don’t you?”  I cast my eyes down at the floor, not really wanting to acknowledge the truth of his words even though I could feel it.  “The trained eye can see these things, and the holy eye of the Night Mother sees them even more clearly.  Without your precious war to sustain you, the only way to fulfill that kind of delight is within the ranks of our Family.”  He took one step toward me and stopped there.  “And that is why you have finally accepted my invitation.  I offer you the soothing hand of our Dread Father, and the love of Brothers and Sisters akin to your true nature.  You are without home or purpose, and I offer these back to you.  I offer you _sanctuary._ ”

My eyes were damp.  That would not do.  I tried to recoil back into myself rather than visibly pine for the things with which he sought to tempt me.  But the tears were visible, and I felt the smooth leather of his glove as he wiped them away with his thumb.  That made my breath catch in my throat, and he wrapped his arms around me, and stood there, silent and cool as I tried desperately to recompose myself.

“Ssh,” he whispered.  “Sithis is the end of pain.  I will show you.”  His lips came up to my cheekbone and kissed the spot where my tears had been.  Then down to touch my lips.  For a moment I felt myself respond hungrily:  it felt like so long since I had been touched, since there had been someone to kiss my tears away.

Then I remembered who he was and what we were talking about, and balked, and backed away from him.  He stood where I left him, arms folded behind his back patiently.

“Come now, Tintaviel,” he purred.

“Don’t call me that.”

He laughed.  “Very well.  You are entitled to a new name to protect your anonymity.  What would you prefer I call you?”

The obvious answer leapt to mind.  “Methusiele.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.  “How antiquated.  But I know you have an appreciation for the antique.  As you like…Methusiele, come and let me seal you to your new Family.”  He extended a hand to me.

“I...I don’t know.”

“There are traditions to be observed here, Methusiele.  And I do not think you find me so very unappealing, do you?”  Again he took one step toward me and stopped.

I was so alone, and he was delicate and fine, and blazed with menace and tightly controlled violence.  Terrifying, had I still had the sense to feel terror.  Lovely, in the same way that certain predators are lovely.  “No.”

He advanced slowly.  I backed into the closed door, and he stopped at arm’s length, cornering me but not touching me.  “Then you will not make me insist.  As I say, there is tradition.  Everyone in the Sanctuary I control must belong to me.”

That was enough to send one last tremor through my dying pride, and I lifted my chin in defiance.  “I belong to no one.”  Did he think I still had it in me to be easily cowed?  “You cannot threaten me, because I have slain monsters other mortals only see in their nightmares.  You cannot burn me because I have walked in Oblivion, and you cannot chill me because I have slept in Cloud Ruler Temple.  You cannot seduce me with whispers because I have followed a voice that made yours sound like tin.”  I mustn’t choke on that memory now, not in the middle of my fine self-righteous speech.  “I make the pact:  I offer you a place in my ruin.  But do not flatter yourself that you are its cause.”

For several breaths he did absolutely nothing.  Did not yell or strike me, did not let me go, did not argue or cajole.  Not even his expression changed, except perhaps that his eyes looked more alive.

Finally, an unexpected toothy grin – oh gods, he was going to try to kill me – and that low, soft chuckle.  “Dread Father.  You are _so_ amusing.”  He stepped into me, and I was pinned.  He raised one hand to my shoulder, gently.  He held but did not push.  “So amusing that I will not choose today to divest you of your illusions.  I will only remind you that this is the price for my offer.”  He leaned in, breathed the last into the side of my throat.  “And perhaps it will hasten along the ruin you seek.”

Among healthy people that sort of statement should not have been an effective seduction.  But we were people broken beyond repair, and I turned my face to meet his, to suck his cold breath into my throat.  There was no point in damning myself by half-measures.

His tongue probed my mouth and be began to rub at my breasts with a knowing but demanding touch.  Soon one hand broke away to pry the knife loose from my fingers, and it clattered to the floor.  He peeled off one glove and then the other, and then returned to kissing and fondling me.  I reached up to touch his face, to push back the hood – but his hands came up to grab at my wrists.  “No,” he whispered.  “You have not earned that.”  He nipped at my lower lip as he pressed his mouth back over mine, and continued to hold my hands against the door to keep me from trying again.

He left the kiss again a few moments later to focus on removing my robe, which slunk to the floor still heavy with drying blood.  He bade me to finish getting naked while he watched, and I complied.  He removed nothing from himself, but opened the front of his black robes and of his trousers.  He ran his fingertips over me from a pace away, almost casually, looking and assessing, with just a trace of a smile.  My nerves began to dance from the lightness of his touch.

“Mm.  Yes.”  He just touched his lips to the side of my throat.  “We must be sure this is memorable enough to make you feel compliant.  You are a willful creature.  What will inspire you to loyalty, do you think?”  He moved two fingers across my lips, then kissed me.  I met his tongue with mine and reached down into his pants to stroke up and down the length of his erection.  That he allowed a few times before he swatted my hand away.  He reached into my crotch and rubbed there, and I moaned into his mouth.  But he stopped and moved that hand around behind me, entering me there with one moistened finger, and I gasped.

He stopped to smile.  “Ah, there.  No one has been through that door yet, have they?  That will do.”  He grabbed me by the wrist and led me further into the room, to the bed.  “Face down,” he said, and when I hesitated he pulled close and purred into my ear, “Please me and I will please you.  We will both be happier if you cooperate.”  To punctuate this he stroked up the side of my throat with his tongue.

I lowered myself onto the bed and laid down on my stomach.  He knelt over me and pulled my hair aside to kiss and bite at the back of my neck.  His hand – warm, against my whole sense of his nature – rubbed up and down the length of my back, massaging my ass and occasionally pulling the cheeks apart in anticipation.  I bit my lip, panting in a combination of desire and anxiety.

He moved between my legs and drove into me, into the more usual place.  He paused for just a second to watch my response, then pumped hard, reaching up into my hair and grabbing it at the scalp to pull my head back.  He smiled at my moaning and licked the back of my ear between thrusts.  I had begun to think it had been an idle threat when he paused and withdrew.  “Now,” he whispered.  “Spread your legs further.”  He encouraged me with one hand, pulling my knee up to the side.  My hips ached with how wide he wanted me spread, but I complied.  He reached down to rub at the place he had abandoned, to reward me, and I stifled my whimpering with my hand.  He pulled the juices back toward the new site of conquest.

“Hmm,” he mused.  “Only taming you, not breaking you.  The salve.”  He reached for something in his belt, worked with it behind my back, and put the thing down within my line of sight:  a little vial of some sort of cream.  He rubbed a bit of this into place, cool and slightly tingling.

“You’re lucky I have that,” he whispered as he came back over me, his member now exerting a slow pressure on the unclaimed opening.  “It’s for wounds, really.  Relax now.  It will not hurt if you surrender completely.”

He pressed into me, the flesh yielding reluctantly.  I felt just the head force its way through first.   I shuddered, and he kissed the back of my neck again.  Then it was almost as if the rest of his length was pulled in naturally, and the slow rhythm with which he began to take me seemed as much a matter of drawing back out as thrusting inward.  I was clenched tight around him, but the salve kept the way smooth at first, and my body seemed to want to give over to him.  I could feel myself still wet and open, cool shivers of excitement and desire still dancing through me although denied their usual fulfillment.

But perhaps the yearning became too strong, or the salve began to wear away, because I felt myself tighten further around him, and his movement suddenly brought a ripping pain.  I shook and cried out.  He brought a hand up to cover my mouth, and slowed, but did not stop. 

“Hush,” he said.  “Give over.  Stop fighting me.”  I tried to force myself to relax, to unclench the muscles that had tensed, gasping with effort and pain.  He removed the hand from my mouth and snaked it underneath me, stroked there just a little bit, until I moaned and sank deeper into the mattress.  “Good girl,” he whispered, and resumed speed.

From then on I had to focus on untensing, on giving myself to him completely – and that was when I understood how that had been the point of his choice, to habituate me to surrender to his will.  But by the time I thought of that, I was deeply entranced, slow waves of pleasure gently unfolding through me, and I was willing to give him this or anything else he asked of me.  I even maintained this blissful passivity as his own pleasure drove him to a less cautious pace.  He bit into my neck as he came, and I only sighed.

He withdrew, and as I lay splayed out and half-conscious on the bed, he refastened his robe and trousers, then went to pick up my robe and inspect it.  “I don’t think this can be salvaged.  I assume you have a change of clothes in your bag?”  I grunted something vaguely affirmative.  “Then I will dispose of the robe.  Clean yourself up and dress.  By the time I come back, you should be clear-headed enough for me to give you instructions, and I will tell you where to find your Brothers and Sisters.”

And the chameleon effect rippled back over him, and he was gone.

It took several moments before I managed to roll out of the bed onto the floor, toward the chest where my things were.  I wiped myself clean as best I could and fumbled for pants and a shirt.  I managed to get them on and sit back down on the bed, but anything beyond that was a loss.  Although my head did indeed begin to clear, my returning faculties imposed their own daze and left me just as useless.

What had I _done?_

I was taken aback by my violence against Rufio.  I was aghast at what I had allowed Lucien to do to me.  And I was horrified by the lonesome, fallen part of me that had already begun to worry about whether he would really come back for me, because it was afraid he _wouldn’t_ , and I would be alone again _._

And the slow, deep ripplings of desire had not yet quite stopped, even then.

All of this meant that when Lucien did in fact return, I was still sitting stunned on the bed.  He stood over me and lifted my chin to look into my eyes.  “Hmm.  You are still not quite in there, are you?  Perhaps I had better take you there myself.  I will not have done so much work just to have you wander off bewildered to be lost or killed.”

I resented being spoken of as if I were a child, but I resented it the way a sleepy child would.  I sulked in my quiet stupor as he pulled me to my feet and pulled my bag from the chest.  “Where is that ring you wear?” he asked, then remembered where I had put it, retrieved it, and slipped it onto my finger.  Holding my hand, he rehid himself, and I felt him pull me along, down and out of the inn and to the nearby stable.

He helped me up onto a majestic black mare with awful red eyes.  He mounted in front of me, felt for my arms and put them around his waist.  Then he made clicking sounds to the horse, called her Shadowmere, and we were away, with a speed that my paint horse could not have dreamed.  The speed with which the Heartlands passed by did nothing to clear my head, nor did the hours of silence between us that I used to deepen my self-deprecating reverie, so I nestled my face into Lucien’s back and closed my eyes. 

By the end of the day we had reached Cheydinhal – from near Bravil to Cheydinhal in a day’s ride, and not along the main roads.  A marvelous horse.  With one hand at my waist and one at my elbow, he escorted me to an abandoned house, and we slipped inside.  Here he made himself visible and felt to remove my ring.  Then he took me by the hand and led me down into a tunnel beneath the house, and to an eerily glowing red door.

“Sanguine, my Brother,” he said, and the stone door rolled aside.

What luck that the password should have been the name of the Daedric Lord who had brought me together with my dead lover for the first time.  A horrible shudder of grief swept through me, and I was not only quite useless again but in danger of throwing myself onto the floor in a weeping wreck.

He gathered me up calmly and held me to keep me standing.  “Ssh, ssh.  Only a little further now, Methusiele.  Your Family is waiting to meet you.”

I didn’t want my Family any more.  I wanted Martin.  What had I done?  What was I doing?

But Martin was gone.  Jauffre and Baurus were gone.  Every reason I had not to surrender to my real nature had left me behind forever.  I took a deep breath, nodded assent to Lucien, and allowed him to continue leading me into the Sanctuary.

“You are going to see a skeleton shortly,” he murmured into my ear.  “It belongs to the Sanctuary.  Do not attack.”  I nodded again, thankful he’d warned me, because I would have done it.

The stony hall the skeleton patrolled was the central hub from which several passages extended.  We passed the doors on each side and walked into the passageway in the back, following it to another door there.  Here, Lucien gave a knock with a particular-sounding cadence, and the door opened to show an Argonian woman, mostly green with red cheeks.  She was dressed in black too, but rather than a robe she was wearing a sort of wrapped armor.  She ushered us in and closed the door behind us.  Lucian sat me down on the bed, and the two of them regarded me like a horse they might buy.

“Here she is, Ocheeva,” Lucien said.  “I assure you that she will be worth the wait.”

“Hmph.”  Ocheeva studied me, pushed back my hair with her cool hand to look into my eyes.  “This one is still so raw, Lucien.”

“So you will guide her.  You will tame this fire to our use, and we will burn Cyrodiil with it.”

She looked again, and her eyes widened in recognition.  “Dread Father!  She is the – ”

“Yes.  And we have her.”

As best I could read Argonian faces, Ocheeva scowled.  “Oh, this is dangerous.  She is so well-known.”

“It’s perfect.  She is above suspicion, with every reason to travel frequently.”

“Can she be _subtle?_   We seldom get contracts to wipe people out by the dozens.”

“In closed spaces, she melds into the shadows.  Even I have to concentrate to keep track of her, until she strikes.  She is an asset, Ocheeva.”

“Hmm.”  Ocheeva stepped back and stomped several times on the floor, making a hollow noise.  A trapdoor, I supposed.  “I will apprentice her to Vicente.  He has a way with the temperamental ones.”

“Good, but do not neglect her yourself.  There is no substitute for your motherly guidance.”  He scratched underneath the ring of little horns around her head, and she narrowed her eyes happily.

“Flatterer,” she growled.

The trapdoor swung open, and the head that emerged was gaunt and white, with glimmering red eyes.  A vampire.  I reacted by instinct, raising a hand with flames already dancing between my fingertips.

“ _Hold!_ ” Lucien shouted, and lunged forward to grab my hand.  Ocheeva grabbed me on the other side to make sure I tried no other violence.  The vampire ducked for a moment, then re-emerged, looking startled and confused.

“There!” Ocheeva snapped.  “That’s the Fifth Tenet nearly broken already, and the night’s hardly begun.”

“She has been fighting necromancers and vampires for some time, Ocheeva,” Lucien sighed.  “She will not attack him now that she knows.  She never attacked Hassildor.”

Lucien knew about Hassildor?

“Is that a promise?” said the vampire, still not emerging entirely from beneath the floor.

“Yes, Vicente.  Come and meet Methusiele.”

“Lovely name.”  He climbed up at last to join us, covering his discomfort by straightening his black vest.  “Surprising lady.”  His accent was Breton, and he had long brown hair, tied back in a ponytail.  He looked at me, and he raised a finger to point as his expression shifted.

“Yes, you do recognize her,” said Ocheeva, preventing the question.  “But here she will be Methusiele.  We will keep custom.  She will need it more than most of us.”

“Good, Ocheeva.”  Lucien smiled.  “I am glad to see that you are coming around to my way of thinking.  I am going to want regular reports on her progress, and I am going to want to be pleased with them.”

Nearly incinerating Vicente had finally started to clear my head, and I spoke.  “I am in the _room_ with you.  One of you might try addressing me directly at some point.”

The other two gawked at me, but Lucien chuckled.  “Ah!  There she is.  _This_ is our Methusiele.”

  



	2. Reach for the Quiet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meetings with the rest of the Sanctuary, the first contract, and the reward for obedience. (sex chapter)

Lucien told me to behave until he came to see me again, and kissed me.  He kissed Ocheeva on the tip of her snout and Vicente on the cheek.

And then he left me there.

Left behind, again.  Perhaps it was punishment for all the times I had been the one who rode away and left someone to wait for me.

Vicente saw the new wave of sorrow threatening, and quickly offered a hand to pull me to my feet.  “Greetings, Sister,” he said warmly.  “I am honored to welcome you to our Family.  You have not been left among strangers.”  He understood.  I squeezed his hand, grateful.

Good with the temperamental ones, she’d said.

“It is only that our beloved Speaker has so much work to do on our behalf,” he went on.  “But his love and the love of our Dread Father unites us.  You will find peace here, Methusiele.  Come, let us introduce you to your Brothers and Sisters.  Most of them are here.”

He escorted me out of Ocheeva’s room, up into the hub and through one of the doors.  Down this hall was a great room full of small beds, a bit more luxurious than the barracks at Cloud Ruler Temple.  Here were four people in widely varied states of relaxation and of dress.

The male Khajiit in the back rose at once, growled and harrumphed, and stalked up the hall and away from us.  Vicente clucked his tongue and rubbed at the place between his eyes.  “Please don’t mind M’raaj-Dar,” he said, apologetic.  “He’s always like this with new recruits.  Jealous, I think.  He’ll warm up to you.”

“Oh, he was to me!” said a pretty little Breton girl, sitting up from her relaxed stretch across one of the beds.  “Perfectly dreadful.  Still not what I’d call _friendly_ , but it does get better.”

“Another elf, huh?” said a barrel-chested orc from the other side of the room.  He had been shadow-boxing, bare chested.  A huge green creature, his face even harder to read than an Argonian’s.  “You should meet my girl, then!  But she’s out on patrol.  I’m Gogron.”

“Gogron,” I repeated.  “Hello.”

“Teinaava,” said the male Argonian.  “I am always pleased to meet a new child of Sithis.”

“Antoinetta Marie,” said the pretty girl.  Then she looked at me again and gasped.  “You’re the Champion of Cyrodiil!” she cried, rather loudly.

“She is _Methusiele_ ,” said Vicente, with no small amount of impatience in his voice.  “We do not refer to her by outside names or titles here, as you should know by now.”

“But she _is_.  I can’t help that.  It’s exciting!”  She looked at me with tactless wonder.  “Oh, you’ve killed all sorts of people, haven’t you?  They say you were fucking that man who was almost the Emperor.  Martin.  Were you?”

Teinaava hissed and Vicente looked on the edge of violence, but I raised a hand to quiet them and answer her myself.  “Yes.  I was.  And now he’s dead.  Imagine how much I like to talk about it.”

I’d never come out and said _he is dead_ before.  The words tasted awful.

Her eyes went round.  “Oh.  Of course, when you put it that way.  Sorry.”

“I would not say the name again within my hearing.”  I was able to make it sound so cool and distant because I knew I was not supposed to kill her.

“Antoinetta was the most recent recruit before yourself,” Vicente said quietly.  “She’s very… _young._ ”

“Friendly, though!” she chirped, and technically I could not disagree.

Teinaava suggested that wine might lighten the atmosphere, and he was right.  After a few drinks, the mood relaxed a bit, and the stories started flowing.  I told them how I had met Lucien:  how fellow treasure hunter Claude Maric had bedded me, attempted to steal from me, set his cohorts to kill me when I resisted, and died by my hand.  They appreciated the justice of it.

Vicente had been bitten hundreds of years ago in Vvardenfell, and had come to the Dark Brotherhood disillusioned with both the political machinery of high vampiric society and the low gutter life of the unclanned:  Lucien had offered him another option that deprived him of neither human company nor his ability to fulfill his hunger when it called.

Antoinetta had been a runaway wastrel when Lucien found her.  She’d been an orphan living with her aunt and uncle; but his affection had turned unwholesome in its expression, and in trying to poison him she’d killed her aunt instead.  She’d been twelve then.  Lucien found her homeless at sixteen.  He had been her savior, and she spoke of him in reverent, smitten tones.

Teinaava was Ocheeva’s twin.  They had both been born under the sign of the Shadow, which in their homeland had destined them for the Dark Brotherhood, which took them as children and trained them to be assassins.  They had been transferred to Lucien’s Sanctuary at their request, because of his high reputation.

Gogron had always liked to kill things.  He liked it even better than normal orc society found comfortable.  He’d originally belonged to another Sanctuary but had been traded to Lucien when one of his previous recruits was chosen to assist another Speaker and moved away from Cheydinhal.

Such were my new Brothers and Sisters.  They were hardly the virtuous Blades, but neither was I.  Perhaps I never really had been:  perhaps all along I’d just been a killer with romantic notions.

I only slept there one night before I realized it should not really be my home.  I discussed it with Ocheeva, who quickly agreed:  I was too well known to be seen in Cheydinhal during the day and not have anyone wonder where I was sleeping at night.  Technically, I would have been welcome at the house the Count’s son, Farwil, had built for his Knights of the Thorn, but the chance that I would actually have to spend time with him there was unacceptable.  I visited the Count instead, and bought a lovely house.  It was an easy walk to the abandoned lot from there.

Still I spent most of my time at the Sanctuary, and it was oddly soothing.  They gave me a suit of their black-shrouded armor, which was enchanted to improve my stealth and my ability to fight.  They taught me the Five Tenets that were our only laws:  we were not to dishonor the Night Mother, or to betray the Brotherhood or disobey our superiors, or to steal from or kill our own Brothers or Sisters.  And that was all.  They taught me _poisons_ , which I took to as if I had been making poisons forever.  I credited my previous experience with alchemy for the talent:  soon I was inventing poisons and giving them out for the others to use.  They taught me to be more graceful with my little dagger.

Most importantly, they taught me to feel the presence of Sithis.  The first time I succeeded in bringing his energy into me, the shock of the change almost jerked me back out of the meditation immediately:  it was like falling into freezing water.  But as I sat with it, the chill drained the life out of my pent-up anger and pain, and I floated in that sensation, blissfully numb.  Vicente was beaming at me when I emerged, slow and bleary-eyed, from that cold peace.

“There,” he said.  “You have tasted the fruits of our devotion.  You’ve learned well, Methusiele.  You are ready to take your first contract.  There is a pirate ship docked by the Waterfront in the Imperial City – the _Marie Elena._   You are to execute its captain, Gaston Tussaud.”

I recoiled, and he looked confused, then thoughtful.  “Is this the residual sense of honor Lucien mentioned?  The man is a pirate, no pillar of society.”

I appreciated that.  I shook my head.  “Is there no contract somewhere else?  Perhaps Leyawiin?”

“Ah.”  He touched my shoulder.  “But you have our Dread Father’s gift now, to ward you against your past.  Lucien would not have set this task for you unless he thought you were ready.”

“He was here?”  And I hadn’t seen him.  He’d tracked me all that time, used my need to lure me here, and now he was done with me.  How perfectly typical of my skill at choosing partners.

Vicente smiled.  “He comes and goes all the time.  One only knows if he makes it known, because he has some business or pleasure to attend to.  He neglects no one over the long term, even if he has favorites.  I’m sure you will see him after you complete your first contract.  It’s a cause for celebration.”

“So he’s…ah.  Intimately connected to all the members.”  I should have known that:  he’d more or less told me as much himself.

“Once at least, at inception.  After that, it depends on how the relationship develops.”  He dropped his voice to a polite whisper.  “For example, I do not think he has continued with Gogron:  he has taken a more fatherly interest there.  Of course, he was a transfer.  We do not think less of him.”

Ah, yes.  Lucien and Gogron had been the hardest pairing to imagine. I could not imagine that Lucien ever relinquished the dominant role, and it was almost equally difficult to picture Gogron as a pliant receiver.

“And you?  Is that your usual preference?”

He laughed a little.  “After a few centuries you hardly notice little things like gender.  But yes, I enjoy a close relationship with our Speaker.”  He pushed back a lock of my hair with one finger.  “But you will see him again, Methusiele.  No one is neglected.”

I nodded.  “I suppose I shouldn’t pry.”

“Nonsense.  We’re Family: it’s right that we know each other.  But in any case, you have your contract, and you should set about it.”

I went to the Imperial City under the pretense of visiting the Arcane University, as was only proper for the Arch-Mage.  In fact, if I had been like any Arch-Mage before me, I should have made that my home and the hub of my travels; but that was not going to happen.  The city was recovering well from its brush with catastrophe:  it was hard now, in the districts I visited, to find the charring.  Still, I was uneasy here, and kept my distance from certain parts of town.  Thankfully, no windows looked down from the Arch-Mage’s tower, and I could pretend that the University was its own separate world.

After I had been there a sensible amount of time, I went out by night in my new armor and with my ring, and crept into the Waterfront, where the pirate ship waited quietly.  The stealth I had always used in Ayleid ruins and cultic lairs was adequate to the challenge of pirates as well, and before long I stood in the captain’s private quarters, watching him sleep.

I had never killed a sleeping man before.  I reminded myself that this was a pirate captain, dangerous when awake; I told myself that this was not so different from sneaking up and blasting my enemies while they were unaware of me, as I had always done.  I almost believed me.

The Blade of Woe glinted with a hint of sickly green, the residue of one of my own poisons.  I sliced the man’s throat, and he gurgled and died.  It was that simple.  But there were sounds of someone stirring outside, possibly coming to the cabin, and I fled out the rear window and off of the balcony.

In the morning I publicly departed the University for Cheydinhal, and spent the trip musing over how straightforward the business of murder was.  Blessedly simple, comparatively.

I was greeted on my return to the Sanctuary by the sound of arguing.

“Are you trying to _kill_ me?  How hard can it really be to remember _one_ allergy?”

It was Vicente’s voice, followed by Antoinetta’s:  “Well, I don’t know!  And potatoes without garlic are boring!  Ask anyone but you!”

Then a tranquil voice I didn’t recognize said, “Do the two of you really want to be fighting when – here, it’s too late.  This is Methusiele, I take it.”

“Sister!” Vicente called as I came into the room, and turned quite deliberately away from Antoinetta.  “Word of your success has preceded you, my dear.  Well done!  Very elegant for your first formal contract.”

“Now, see,” Gogron said with what I could only suppose was a grin, “what I liked was the way she did Rufio.  Painted the walls with him!  Let ‘em know they’re dead, that’s what I think.”

The stranger, a plainish Bosmer woman with hair a deeper copper than mine, giggled and placed her hand on his chest.  “I know, Brother.  But most of us try to be more subtle.”  She turned to face me.  “I’m Telaendril.  I’m sorry we haven’t had the pleasure, but I spend a lot of time out on patrol.”  I nodded to her.

Teinaava gave me a little hug.  We’d grown fond making poisons together.

We had dinner together, all of us – except, of course, for M’raaj-Dar, who took his food off somewhere so as not to have to “smell all the apes” while he was eating.  Everyone else was friendly and congratulatory.

They’d made me _cake._   Vicente also gave me an enchanted ring for protection on future assignments.  It was like having a birthday.  At least it was like what I imagined birthdays must be.

Another surprise awaited me back at my house, comfortably seated in my living room.  “Congratulations, Methusiele.  I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

“Yes, well, I’ve seen how diverse your tastes are.  You would seem to be a difficult man to disappoint.”

He chuckled as he rose to his feet.  “I should have guessed that you were a jealous woman.  But I haven’t come to argue with you, my dear.  I’ve come to reward you.”  He caressed my cheek, and damn him, I was still starved enough to leap for scraps.

“Really,” I drawled, although I leaned into his touch.

“Mmm.”  He started punctuating his words with kisses to the side of my throat.  “I do not demand more fidelity than I give you.  My Family is your Family.  I will not complain if you enjoy any you may find pleasing.  Vicente is very cultured, and I know you have a fondness for Argonians.”

Against my better judgment I found my arm drifting around his waist to keep the kisses coming.  “How much of the time _were_ you following me?”

“Surely it’s not important now,” he purred, and enforced the end of the conversation by covering my mouth with his.  And that made it true:  it wasn’t important anymore.  Touch was important, sensation.  I returned the kiss with an eagerness that should have embarrassed me but did not.  As our tongues met he started to unfasten my robes, and I helped him undress me.  As before, he removed his gloves to touch me, and his hands wandered slowly this time, unhurried. 

He lavished extra attention on the hair on my mound, teasing it with his fingers, and chuckled to himself.  “It’s like Arquen’s!  Short and fine like a manicured lawn.  I never believed her when she said it was natural, but perhaps it is on an Altmer.”

“I don’t need to hear how I compare to your other conquests.”

That made him laugh in earnest.  “Shall I pretend to be virgin for you?  No.  But I assure you that you are comparing favorably.”  Again he used his kiss to silence me, and again I allowed it.  I shifted my attention to opening his robe.  He allowed me that, but when I started to pull it away from his shoulders he pried my hands away and held them.

That was starting to frustrate me, his refusal to allow me his skin when he had free access to mine.  I wanted to feel living flesh:  I was starting to want to dig my nails into it.  When my hands were free again I opened the front of his shirt and clawed at his pale chest, pulled at the light dusting of hair.  I knew I might get myself hurt pushing further than that, but all the same, I felt better.

“What a stubborn thing you are,” he whispered.  “If you must bother yourself with clothing, do some good.”  He guided a hand down to his waist, and obligingly I opened his pants, pulled his already swollen member free and stroked it gently.  He bit my earlobe and then placed one hand, in an oddly deliberate gesture, between my shoulder blades.

I felt a rush, a strange, dizzy…lightening.  “Did you…cast something on me?”

He smiled.  “Well.  I am no Arch-Mage, but I know a little something.”  He stooped a little, grabbing me behind the thighs, and hoisted me up as if I were half my real weight – Feather, that was what he had done – and pressed my back into the wall, stepping in close between my legs.  I gasped and wrapped myself around him for fear he’d let me drop.  He thrust up into me, and I gasped again.  The nature of the position forced me open wide, and he drove in deep.  He grinned at my shivering and paused:  using his weight to pin me between him and the wall, he raised one hand for a moment to bring my breast to his lips, and by the time he had firm hold of my leg again and resumed motion, he had crossed from sucking to biting.  There was both pleasure and discomfort in my moans.

That was his special gift:  he knew very well the line between pain that enticed, and pain that only hurt, and he had absolute control over where on that spectrum his actions fell.  He did not cross it, that time.  But he did bite, and he fucked me sore, and his fingertips dug deep enough into my thighs to bruise.  And I only clung to him for dear life and groaned, powerless in this position to accomplish much more.

I felt him refresh the spell as his lips returned to my neck.  Now we were pressed even more tightly together, only the thin layer of our sweat left between us.  I brought a hand to the back of his head, wishing that I were allowed to clutch at his hair rather than fabric.  But he growled happily at my show of enthusiasm, and for a moment I thought – _I can make him want me that much.  I can win him over._

I came to my senses almost immediately.  Could I, now?  Against the clear current of the Dark Brotherhood’s training?  And by the N – Dread Father, did I really want to?

He had paused again to refresh the spell before he came, his eyes locked on mine and full of a fire that could not touch the rest of his cold face.  He let me slide down the wall to a level where he could safely let go of my legs, then gave me a slow, long kiss as we both regained our balance.  He had already closed up most of his clothing again when he disentangled from me and went in search of his discarded gloves.

I crumpled onto the floor by the wall, weighed down by both my own thoughts and the fading of the last spell.  “And so you’re going.”

“That was a very tiring position, and I do not intend to sleep here.”  He crossed back to me, and knelt to touch my cheek and kiss me again.  “You are mine, Methusiele.  Do not allow yourself to doubt it.  In fact, you may become my favorite.”

Even after he was gone, only one short thought emerged in answer to that.

Ha.

 


	3. Turn to Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trips to Bruma and the Imperial City are more than Methusiele can bear, leading to a grief-filled skooma binge.

My next assignment was in Bruma.

“Does he choose the cities to spite me?” I complained.

As was becoming habitual, Vicente patted me comfortingly on the shoulder.  “The Night Mother chooses.  She must have great trust in your strength.  Now – the target is an old Bosmer gentleman named Baenlin.  He seldom leaves his house.”  He regarded the doubt in my face, knowing that I was not yet quite comfortable with this kind of killing, and added, “The client implies that when he had the strength, he was a pederast.”  I nodded in relief, and he continued.  “Ocheeva would like to see how far you’ve come from the grand theatrics of your wartime kills.  If you can make this look like an accident, I will give you a bonus.”

As he escorted me out, Gogron was arriving from his own last contract.  “I got her!” he chortled.  “In the middle of her fifth birthday party!  It was so _funny._   I almost lopped her head clean off in one shot!”

As I raised a hand to my mouth against – what? Would I have screamed, vomited, struck him? – Vicente stepped between us quickly to work his diplomatic magic.  “I rejoice in your success, of course, but do remember that our Sister is not yet as…hmm…as pure in her motives as you are.  She is accustomed to being a weapon of justice.”

“Oh.  Yeah.”  Gogron frowned for a moment in thought.  Then he said, in helpful tones, “She was a _horrible_ little girl.  She, um, ate kittens.  Without onions or anything.”

I kept my mouth covered and nodded.  _Yes, that’s lovely, Gogron.  Please stop._

Finally he went off in search of a more enthusiastic audience, and Vicente whispered to me, “To each the contract to which each is suited, Methusiele.  _Your_ target has ruined lives; _your_ contract is just.  Keep your focus.”

A message came to the house while I was preparing to leave.  Ocato, telling me that my dragon armor was ready.

Oh!  I could feel my reason slipping just a little out of true, a veneer of calm denial over the panic.  Well, how convenient:  I could just go to the Palace District and pick it up on my way to Bruma, and leave it at my old house.  I could just trace the last two days we ever had together backwards.  It would be no trouble at all.

I forced myself to breathe, and then to practice the meditation I had been taught.  I let the ice wash over me and tried to draw strength from it.  I was not a slave to my past.  Sithis was the end of pain.  That was the teaching, and I clung to it for support.

That was enough to get me to the Imperial City, but the further in I went, the less it sufficed.  It had been one thing to go to the University, where he had never been, and quite another to set foot in the Palace District again and remember entering it as his herald and his right hand, his champion and his lover.  As the last mortal to see him alive.

That memory tainted the whole city:  that made it all his, and not mine.  And that was not _fair._   He’d spent mere hours here, and I had made it my first home, the center around which my life had revolved until the day I’d agreed to be a Blade and live at the cursed Temple.  It was _my_ city, and I did not want him to take it from me like he’d taken everything else.

But now it was as if he haunted the whole town.  It was as if his voice followed me, whispering, reminding me how he had loved me, coaxing me toward the Temple of the One to see the terrible monument to my loss.

_No._   I pushed the voice away with all my will, mentally screamed to Sithis to drown it.  It was not fair. 

Ocato was thoroughly himself, and the armor was beautiful.  It looked just like Martin’s.  I bit my tongue hard enough to make it bleed.

I did not kill anyone in the Imperial City, but I left feeling newly enthusiastic to kill _someone._

The voice did not haunt me in my house in Bruma, but I was still no happier.  Every keepsake from my other life remembered his hand upon it, the story I had told him about it.  The bed remembered him, and scolded me for taking solace in a murderer’s arms.  That wasn’t fair, either:  it should not be possible to be unfaithful to a memory.  Still I laid down there for just a moment and tried to feel his impression there, his warmth.  Of course both were long gone.

Seeing the completed statue the Countess had ordered as a monument to me was surreal.  They had made a lantern of her staff, so that she cast a perpetual light over her corner of the town, and her brave, fierce gaze was pointed upward.  I did not recognize her as any part of myself.

Even the murder itself provided disappointingly little distraction – though it was awfully convenient, as it came to light that Baenlin was my next door neighbor.  I made Vicente’s tidy accident by slipping into the crawlspace and loosening the fastenings behind a minotaur head that hung behind the old mer’s chair.  It fell on him and killed him.  So simple that it was not satisfying at all.  While I was drinking that disappointment away at the Tap and Tack, trying not to remember drinking there with my dead friend Baurus, I was able to hear the sad noises about what a respectable citizen Baenlin the pederast had been, and what a pity it was that his surly nephew (perhaps a former victim?) would inherit the house.

What a pointless, bitter lie the world was.

Meditations on the void were no longer equal to the task I was setting for them.  I rode back to Cheydinhal without passing through the Imperial City, arriving at nightfall and shutting myself in with several bottles of expensive wine and vials of skooma.  I’d never tried it before, but other miserable wretches seemed to swear by it.

I spent the night and the following day in varying degrees of delirium:  alcohol and skooma are a potent and bewildering combination.  I didn’t hear her come in, but of course I would not have in any case.

Ocheeva looked down at me sprawled across my bed.  “You haven’t come home for your payment,” she said.

My head was hanging over the edge of the bed:  Ocheeva was upside down to me, and slightly blurred and stretched.  “I don’t want to be an assassin any more.  I don’t want to be anything.”

“I see.  Bruma was unpleasant for you.  Remember to meditate on – ”

“It isn’t _working!_ ”  I screamed.

She did not raise her voice back to me.  “We can’t have this, little one.  You are too famous and too deadly to allow yourself to fall apart.  Try again.”

“I can’t!”  I came up to my knees, crying.  “I can’t do it!  _Make him get out of my head!_ ”

Ocheeva sat down on the bed next to me, pulled my head down to her shoulder, and held me there.  As I started to melt, she stroked my hair.

“I want him back,” I sobbed.  “It’s killing me.  I want him back.”

“Ssh.  There, there, little shade.  I know your pain.  You are with your Family now.  Together we will make the world suffer for what it has done to you.”  She let me cry for a few minutes, and then pushed me back a little to look at me.  “You haven’t bathed since Bruma, have you?  Perhaps that would relax you.”  She rose from the bed.

I was still both upset and a bit drunk.  I grabbed her by the wrist.  “Don’t leave me alone.  Everyone leaves.”

“I’m not leaving, pet.  I’m just warming some water.  Come with me if you like.”  She paused.  “If you can walk on your own.”  I could, roughly.

I’d had the tub set up downstairs so as to be near the water and the fireplace.  Ocheeva studied it as she was heating the water.  “It’s a nice size.  I suppose it will be easier to keep you from drowning yourself if I get in with you.  Here, get undressed – tsk, not like that, you poor thing.  Let me help you, then.”  She wrestled with both me and my unchanged traveling clothes, then took off her own dark things, and I stared at her.

She was a lovely banded red and green, with a sort of chevron stripe emphasizing her lower belly.  But the reason I was staring was at the confirmation of a rumor about Argonian anatomy:  she had round swells in the place of breasts but no nipples.

My intoxicated brain could not parse it.  Well, no, of course no nipples…but then why breasts at all?  Just to fool the rest of us?  I started to giggle, tried to stop because I thought it rude, giggled harder for the attempt.  Happily, she took it for one more sign of my hysteria and thought nothing else of it.  She poured the warm water, stepped into the tub, and carefully pulled me in after her.  We sat with me leaned into her, with her arms around me and her tail wrapped carefully beside.  Her touch was like a mother’s or a sister’s, demanding and offering nothing more, simply benign presence.  Her skin was like a snake’s, a layer of cool smoothness behind me.

I rested my head back against her shoulder and sighed, settling back into my more usual state of dull but survivable grief.  She was much more practiced than I was at calling down the peaceful silence of the Dread Father, and it seemed as if she was transferring some bit of it to me by touch.  She teased my hair with her fingers, encouraging me to relax. 

Warmth and comfort and drink together put me half to sleep, and it was effortful to lift myself out of the tub when she decided I had better go to bed.  She helped me dry off and creep up the stairs, and she lay down with me on the too-big bed, her cool hand on my shoulder.

I was lightly asleep, still dimly aware of the world, when I heard her speak softly over my head.  “She was even worse than you said.  Are you sure you don’t want me to wake her so she knows you were here?”

“No.”  Honeyed frost.  Lucien.  “Let her love you for this and not me.  She needs to connect to the Sanctuary.”  A pause.  “But the two of you do look enchanting together.  I will have to keep that in mind.  Come here.”

“I don’t think she’s quite deep enough yet.  She would wake up.”

“Then I will wait with you.”  I felt him lie down on the other side of me, and his arm draped over hers.

“If she were a nobody,” she said, “she could sleep in the Sanctuary with the rest of us and not be so lonely.”

“If she were a nobody,” Lucien answered, “she would not be Methusiele.”

Then I stopped hearing.

Morning found me alone, of course, but with clothes laid out for me and the empty bottles and vials (and even the ones that hadn’t been empty) gone.  I had been cared for.  The pleasant numbness of my Family’s love started to soothe me again, and I went into the Sanctuary ready to be less lukewarm in my duties.

My bonus was a pretty elven dagger, and my next contract was already making Vicente smile before he told me.  It was back in the Imperial City again, but he stopped me before I could complain.

“No, this one should please you, I think.  The Night Mother must find great promise in you to grant such a delicious opportunity.”  He paused for effect.  “Your target is in an Imperial prison cell.  We have learned that there is a secret passageway into the prison through the sewer system: apparently it was uncovered by some ambitious prisoner who was able to escape.”  He grinned as I blushed.  “You will kill a Dunmer prisoner named Valen Dreth.  He has been there a long time:  perhaps he will be familiar to you.”

A Dunmer?...no, surely not.  Not the one whose cruel taunts were my first memory of Cyrodiil? 

I set off at once.  I was eager to please now, eager to show Ocheeva I appreciated her care and would reward her effort.  Eager to show Lucien he had been right to trust me.  Bought and paid for by such a little gesture.

The way was familiar, of course, and haunted by its own set of memories.  Going to Bruma I had traced the end of my old path, stirring up all its grief.  Now I was tracing its beginning, back to the source.  I walked back past the Mythic Dawn, back past the ghost of Baurus, back past the infernal Emperor who had doomed me, back to my old cell.

By the time I reached Valen he had become the origin of all my troubles, and by killing him I was going to purge my soul of all its wretchedness.  The Night Mother was gracious and the Brotherhood my salvation for allowing me such a cleansing.  I slipped off my ring so that he could see me, and as his eyes widened in recognition I smiled and greeted him with the words that had been his last to me.

“You’re going to die in here.”

Unlike him, I had the power to make it so.

 


	4. The Scope of My Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Methusiele finds a rhythm with her contracts, giving her time to debate the nature of the soul with mages and receive a gift from the boss. (sex chapter)

My last contract for Vicente was a disappointment.  He sent me to Chorrol with orders not to kill, but to stage a false assassination for a man who was fleeing Cyrodiil because of his debts.  The coward had offered his own mother’s life in exchange for our help, and Lucien had already collected.  I was to fake Francois Motierre’s death using one of the poisons I myself had helped to invent.

“He sounds detestable,” I scowled.  “What if I were to use just a little too much poison?  Accidentally?”

Vicente laughed.  “Good spirit, but no.  Perhaps one day his creditors will think to hire us, and you will be permitted the pleasure.  Until then, Sister, restraint.  Only what the Night Mother sanctions.”

I arrived in Chorrol a bit ahead of schedule, so I took the opportunity to visit the local Mages’ Guild.  They were happy to have a visit from the Arch-Mage, and celebrated by holding a symposium.  Unfortunately, the favored school of magic in Chorrol was conjuration, my least favorite for a host of reasons.  I sat politely through a long discussion about various methods of evocation; I tolerated a conversation about different forms of daedra and when their help was most appropriate; but then they asked me if I would speak about daedric cults and especially the Mythic Dawn, on which I was now regarded to be an expert.

I responded with a heavy, bitter sigh.  “Gentlemen,” I started – for they all were:  this was the most male-heavy Guild hall in Cyrodiil.  “Apologies, but I am not ready to discuss those findings tonight.  The question comes when I am weary and ill-prepared.  And with all due respect, while I understand your intellectual curiosity, given my history I am loath to discuss daedric work with anyone who might feel any temptation to pursue it.”

“Understandable, though regrettable,” Teekeeus intoned.  Being expelled from the University for his feud with Earana had left him quick to bend with the prevailing wind.

Alberic, the best conjurer among them, did not relent so easily.  “I hope that our new Arch-Mage does not share the common superstitions against conjuration as a school.  That the Mythic Dawn was a danger to the Empire should not brand all of us as potential traitors.”

“Of course not,” I said.  There was no point in telling them that I had, in fact, played briefly with the idea of expelling the conjurers as my predecessor, Traven, had the necromancers.  I’d seen the results of that for myself, and practicality won out.  My official stance would be tolerance, even if my personal feelings did not match.

“And after all,” he went on, pushing forward while he had the momentum, “many of the distinctions that we make in the spiritual worlds are ultimately false.  The cultist at the hidden shrine is no different, ultimately, than the chapel priest.  What is the difference, even, between aedra and daedra?  Perception.  Intent.  Nothing more than that.”

“ _That,_ ” I said a bit less coolly, “cannot be correct.”

“No?  Consider Meridia, who has been counted as both a god and a Daedric Lord, depending on time and culture.  There is no evidence that her real nature has changed.  So which is she in truth?”

“She is an exception, and as you must know, the prevailing story is that she fell into the grey realm between the two specifically because of her fondness for certain daedra.”  And that was a point that I, as the daedric lover of an ascended Emperor, was not eager to explore further, so I moved on quickly. 

“Even more problematic,” I went on, “is your suggestion of intent as the difference.  Intent so seldom matches result in the mortal realm.  I knew cultists in the Mythic Dawn who really believed that their purpose was the perfection of the world, and they were no less harmful because of that.  Consider the opposite case:  a man might begin as a conjurer for selfish reasons only to find that knowledge serving the gods later.”  I had best not linger here too long, either.  “So _our_ intent is hardly the rule to measure by:  it may be naïve even to think that our will exists in any meaningful sense at all.  And the intent of a god or a Daedric Lord is infinitely more difficult to comprehend.  How would we ever learn enough to use that as our measure?”

“Do the lesser daedra themselves have will or intent as we would understand them?” Athragar asked.  “Traditionally we say not:  they are bound either by some Daedric Lord or, temporarily, by their conjurer.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely true,” I answered.  “There was at least one time that I encountered a dremora who made a choice to speak to me when it served no one’s possible purpose but his own.”

From there the conversation drifted back toward ranks of dremora and their comparative uses, and I started to make noises about the lateness of the hour.  No, I could not possibly impose on the Guild to keep me:  I would be perfectly happy at the Oak and Crosier.  Besides which – not that I said as much – it would be much more troublesome to sneak out for a pretend-murder if I stayed with them.  While the rest of us made this polite talk about my leaving or staying Alberic slipped out of the room, and I thought it was because he was annoyed with me about our exchange.  But as I was actually leaving, he came halfway down the stairs and read something aloud:

“Let us now take you Up.  We will show our true faces, which eat one another in amnesia each Age.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“The end of the _Song of Pelinal_ ,” he said, snapping the book shut as punctuation.  “Although he was already dead, he is said to have appeared at the deathbed of Saint Alessia to create the Amulet of Kings and then carry her off to Aetherius.  Many of us take it to imply the ultimate unity of the gods and Daedric Lords.”

“That is a lot to read into such a short passage.”

“Pelinal himself rewards study.  He is accepted as divine by men and yet is considered demonic by the Altmer.  A matter of intent.”  He blinked.  “I am surprised you do not know this.  You are not only Altmeri but a student of Ayleid culture, yes?”

Yes, I was, and besides that, the name of Pelinal caused uncomfortable movements somewhere in the back of my head.  He meant something to my older, sleeping self, and it was not something pleasant.  But none of this was Alberic’s concern.  “I was less a student than a pilferer, to be honest.  My interest was mercenary.”

I made as quick an exit as I could after that, annoyed at the entire conversation and his human complacent self-centeredness in spiritual matters.  What was the difference between aedra and daedra!  It was the difference between peace and strife; it was the difference between Aetherius and Oblivion.  It was the reason I was doomed by my nature to an eternal sorrow from which the nothingness promised by Sithis was my only hope of rescue.

_That_ was the _difference_ , Breton!

Meeting Francois Motierre did not do much to improve my mood.  Not only was he a sorry little thing, he also preferred that I act out his fake assassination in front of a witness whom I was then to leave alive.  That was completely against both my training and my personal inclination.  Dread Father, I was the Arch-Mage, the Champion of Cyrodiil!  I could not have rumors flying about that I had murdered someone!

My concern for my reputation did not strike me then as ironic.  After all, Lucien had mentioned my fame as a factor in my value, precisely because it raised me above suspicion.  And now I’d been sent on a mission that might ruin that.  I thought again about “slipping” with the poison – no.  That would be disobedience, a violation of the Tenets.

I sighed loudly, pulled my hood forward as far as it would go to obscure my face further, and hoped for the best.  I stepped into shadows in a corner of the room while Francois sat by the fire to pretend to be alone.

We did not have to wait long for the Argonian hit man to arrive.  As he began explaining to Francois why he was about to die – quite unprofessional – I stepped forward, my poisoned dagger raised.  Francois made an unconvincing noise about “Oh dear, the Dark Brotherhood!” and I slashed at him, a shallow wound to his throat.  He had asked for the chest, but this looked flashier and might scare him into silence more quickly.  He crumpled to the floor as the poison began to do its work.  While the Argonian looked down at him and growled in frustration, I slipped on my ring and fled the house.

There:  all that remained was to pick up the body the next day.  It was to be taken to the church undercroft to be prepared for burial, as was the usual custom.  I thought that disappearing from the undercroft was a stupid idea too – did he think no one would suspect a trick in that case? – but this was the plan he had come to Lucien with, the one for which he had paid, and I was honor bound to complete it.

I needn’t have worried about rumors of me reaching the good people of Chorrol.  The Argonian did not see fit to wander the streets shouting that someone had beaten him to his attempted murder.  For all I knew he would end up taking credit for it himself, to his superiors at least.  Fine.  Let him profit by my work, if it meant my involvement went unremarked.  I spent another boring day inspecting the Guild hall and talking to Angalmo about alchemy.

It was easier than I feared to set foot in the Chapel of Stendarr, perhaps because he was the god of mercy, and I had stopped believing in him.  In the undercroft I administered the antidote to my poison – and then, while I waited for him to recover enough to be able to leave under his own power, I had to put down the revenants of several dead relatives outraged by his matricide.  His family had some members actually buried on the church grounds.  Another stupid error in judgment on his part, as seemed to be his habit.

The irony of being an assassin who wanted a man dead and could not kill him was _not_ lost on me.

I escorted him to the place where his next hire awaited, someone to smuggle him out of the country.  Good riddance to him.  In the morning I left Chorrol and circled toward Cheydinhal on the Red Road, staying at Roxey Inn rather than going down into the Imperial City.  I’d had quite enough of that.  If avoiding the city meant sleeping in a shabby little room on a pallet, then so be it.

While I was still cleaning myself up, I heard my door open and close, and whirled around to see Antoinetta, lockpick still in hand.

“How do you not get killed?” I snapped, lowering my glowing hand and shaking off the gathered magicka.

“I don’t sneak in on other assassins usually.”  She remained relentlessly cheerful.  “Do you want to go down and have dinner?  I mean, if you have a change of clothes.  Probably shouldn’t walk around together in plain view wearing the uniform, right?”  She grinned.

I didn’t understand her at all.  I looked down as kindly as I could from the foot or more I stood above her.  “I doubt I have anything with me that would fit you.”

“Oh, sure.  Well, anyway, I have this note for you from Lucien, and he said to stay for your answer.”  She dug a parchment out from her cleavage, handed it to me, and stood smiling.  I read:

_Dearest Methusiele.  I already know of your latest triumph, and deeply appreciate your grace in dealing with such an awkward situation.  Do not take my absence as a sign of disfavor, as it grieves me to be too busy to visit you myself.  Please avail yourself of the bearer of this note with my blessings.  I am sure you know some spells that will amuse her. – LL_

Well, now.  I didn’t understand him very well, either.

“What did it say?” she asked.  I knew by instinct and training that notes from Lucien were private, but I was so disarmed by her total lack of subtlety that I simply handed the note to her to read for herself.  She blushed a little, but she was still smiling.

  
Giggling, actually.  “He is so good!” she grinned.  “I told him I liked you, and see what he does!  Isn’t he sweet?”

I wasn’t convinced _sweet_ was what really leapt to mind, and I also wasn’t sure what to do with this proposal, even if Antoinetta was willing.  (Willing to do what, exactly?  He’d mentioned _spells_.  I was a specialist in destruction:  I didn’t think any spell I knew would be the right sort for foreplay.)

She was not a hesitant sort:  she stepped forward and took my hands playfully, oblivious to any possibility that I would refuse her, and brought them up to her lips.  The tip of her tongue danced along my fingertips.  It was…strangely adorable.  She came up onto her toes and reached to pull my face down to hers:  her kiss was soft and sweet, and I could feel the rest of my skin waking up to the possibilities.

“I…I won’t know what I’m doing,” I whispered, apologetic.  “I haven’t done such a thing.”  I was still trying to imagine what Lucien had meant by _spells_.

“What, no girls at all?” Antoinetta laughed.

And there was that, too.  “I don’t remember.” 

“Pft!  Can’t have been very good, then.  Here, help me out of this armor.”  I did, and then, slowly, the simple clothes underneath.  There were freckles across her shoulders, and her skin was shockingly soft.  Her breasts were smaller and more pert than mine, with large pink nipples:  she was more rounded at her hips and backside.  On impulse I also pulled down her braided hair and loosed it with my fingers, letting it fall in dark blond waves.

I let her take my armor, but not my clothes.  She was pretty, and I was responding to her, but that didn’t make her someone I trusted down to my skin.  She hadn’t – hadn’t earned that.  Hearing a thought so Lucien-like coming out of my own head almost startled me out of the mood entirely, but Antoinetta pulled me down into another kiss, and the thought was gone.  Instead I started thinking about how little she was, and how much easier it would be to reach all the points of interest if I were kneeling.  I dropped, taking hold of her by the waist to keep her standing before me – and lingered a moment, running my hands back and forth over her hips, allured by the smoothness of the curve.  I rolled my tongue over one of her thick nipples and pulled it gently into my mouth, and she leaned into me happily, scratching the hair at the nape of my neck.

“Do you know any shock spells?” she whispered in my ear.  I frowned:  I didn’t see any use in hurting her.  “Little ones,” she said.  I thought a bit, and pulled just the faintest hint of magicka into my hand.  I gingerly touched her shoulder, releasing a tiny jolt.  She jumped, and then gave me a grin and a happy growl.

Very well, then.  I sparked my fingertips and drew them gently across her, one by one, watching her spasm, listening to the hunger in her throaty laugh.  The sound brought out something predatory in me:  I wanted to control it, to call it out further until it was a needful wail.  This must be why Lucien kept her when she seemed so useless otherwise.

I pinched both her nipples and sent one last shock through them, and she squealed as I puller her down to kiss me.  I held her in place with one hand as I charged the other with the faintest hint of ice.  Once my fingers were cold I sent them down through her patch of brown curls to the opening beneath them, and slid two fingers into her, resting my thumb on her clit.  She groaned and dug her nails into my back.  I grinned and refused to move again until she was whimpering and gyrating over my hand.

Apparently I did know what I was doing, to some extent.  _Had to keep the other concubines quiet and off my trail somehow, after all._  

Just as she bit her lip in frustration I resumed, rubbing with my thumb as I moved my fingers in and out of her.  She trembled and leaned on me for support, and her weakness called my attention back from my other odd thoughts.  I left a series of tiny bites down the side of her neck, smiling at her whimpers.  All at once she gasped so deeply I thought she was going to scream – she did not, but her whole body seized and then buckled, and she fell over me, and I had to hold us both against collapsing onto the floor.

For a moment she sat there quietly in my lap, in my arms, her head tucked against my shoulder.  At last she spoke.  “Do you – do you want me to – ”

“No,” I said.  I didn’t really _like_ the girl, even after being intimate with her.  This had all been for Lucien anyway, I was increasingly sure.  He would be intercepting Antoinetta somewhere, and making her report in detail what I had done to her, probably while he was fucking her. 

And all that bothered me about it was that I had shown her the note.

“No,” I said again.  “You may go.  Give him my regards.”

 


	5. Cutting to Find the Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Methusiele remembers more of her origin, then finds herself the center of a potentially lethal lovers' quarrel between Lucien and Vicente. (sex chapter)

What I needed, I decided in the morning, was something to clear my head.  Rather than turning off toward Cheydinhal, I continued around the ring toward Bravil so that I could visit a little Ayleid ruin, Anutwyll.

Even that had been robbed of much of its former joy.  Perhaps it was partly because there were more traps than enemies, and most of the traps were poisoned gas, the easiest to overcome.  Oh, to be sure, the crablike land dreugh were formidable, and intimidating in their alien looks the first few times; but that was not quite enough for me.

Perhaps it was the fact that memories were finally starting to come up into the light, and I did not care for them. 

Anutwyll had fallen easily to the revolution.  Its sorcerer-king had ruled for only a few weeks, and was not yet really capable of the degree of leadership he would have needed to keep the human slaves in check when Alessia and Pelinal came.  And why was this?  Because the old king had just died, poisoned by one of his mistresses.  She’d come to him as a lovely young thing, originally from Moranda, and he had been neither the first nor the last Ayleid king to die in her presence.

That was to say nothing of those she’d roused into frenzy against each other just when Umaril was calling for unity against the human threat.  Her beauty and her honeyed words had been their own kinds of poison.

Thence, I thought, both the talent for poisons and the reluctance to use beautiful words when I’d actually meant them.

Lovely little creature, passed around from one power-mad old lecher to the next, little more than a slave herself to all seeming, except that her masters kept turning up dead – stop it.  Kept turning up dead because that was all she could do to save herself, when she could no longer bear the touch of – stop it, _stop it._

What was I going to do with more Welkynd stones anyway?  Hateful things.  I sold them in Bravil for much less than they were worth, and headed back toward Cheydinhal.  I was no longer fit for any purpose except murder.

Vicente ushered me down into his private room, beneath Ocheeva’s after a spiraling hallway.  “How was your last assignment?”

“Disappointing.  It felt – ”  Odd to have to say such a thing.  “It felt incomplete.  Because I didn’t kill anyone.”

He grinned, and the slight extra length of his canines showed.  “You wish you could have.”

“Well, that’s the _point_ , isn’t it?  We kill.  We destroy.”  I paused.  “I have always been a destroyer.”

“I doubt that you will have to deal with such an awkward contract again.  I have not heard of one like it before.  Perhaps the Night Mother allowed it so that you would see and appreciate your calling.”

“Yes, I suppose so.  Do I have another contract waiting?”

“No, not yet.  But I have a few things for you, regardless.  First is this.”  He took a pendant out of his pocket and slipped it around my neck.  “It will give you strength and will,” he said as I looked at the coppery circle on its chain.  Then he gave me an advancement in rank, and a key to the grate over the well outside our abandoned house – a shortcut into the Sanctuary.  I would never have to utter our accursed password again.  “And finally,” he said, now more slowly and deliberately, “I would like to make you an offer.”

I looked back up at him from my presents, and his eyes seemed to shine a bit more red than usual.  “Yes?”

He glanced down, running his tongue over his teeth.  “I know that you have killed my kind before,” he murmured.  “But you and I have gotten along very well, I think.”

I nodded.  In my head I was tallying all the smiles and glances he’d given me since my arrival, each casual touch and gift, and wondering whether, in the end, I was going to be expected to share my favors with every single member of the Sanctuary, like Lucien himself.

Probably not M’raaj-Dar.  Please not Gogron.

“I like to hope that I have changed your mind about us,” he continued, drawing closer to me.  “If I have…I would like to offer you the Dark Gift.  I can make you one of us.”

Even worse than I’d anticipated.  I would actually have been willing to have sex with him:  he was both attractive and kind, and, as Lucien had pointed out, cultured.  But I had no interest in becoming a vampire.  Eternal life was the opposite of what I wanted.  “No.  I’m sorry.”

He sucked his breath in through his teeth, frustrated, and passed his hands gently over my shoulders.  Gently, but I could still feel the tension in fingers I suddenly remembered were stronger than human.  The atmosphere between us seemed to shift slightly.  “Are you sure?” he whispered, pressing against me, brushing his lips against my shoulder.  “That would be so unfortunate.  I kept myself hungry for you.”

“She said no.”  We both turned to see Lucien standing in the doorway.  He looked even more dangerous without the cool smile to which I’d grown accustomed.  “And you know better than to do this without my leave.”

Vicente’s grasp on my arms tightened uncomfortably, and I could hear the quickening of his breath.  He turned back away from Lucien, back toward the base of my neck, against orders.  He was losing control.  “Forgive me, Methusiele.  But you are so – ”

“ _Vicente!_ ” 

It was the first time I had heard Lucien raise his voice.  I jumped, even knowing I was not the object of his anger.  Vicente glared at him, and I thought he would refuse to let me go, until we both saw the dagger Lucien had raised.  I could see the stored magicka flickering across its edge:  it was a fire blade.  Fire against the vampire.  It was Lucien’s business to be well prepared.

“It is _this_ knife, Vicente,” Lucien snarled.  “Do not make me use it.”

Vicente stepped away from me, eyes fixed on Lucien.

“Methusiele,” said Lucien, “you may take your leave.  Vicente, you will drink from the blood we have stored for you and calm down.”

“It will not do,” Vicente rasped.  “As you know.  I was going to turn her.  A bottle of old blood will not _suffice._ ”

Lucien made an angry, strangled noise, his eyes and knifepoint still trained on Vicente.

I didn’t want to leave them like this, not knowing what they might be about to do to each other.  Until today, Vicente had never been anything but good to me, and I did not hold him responsible for the madness his hunger caused.  I had seen it overcome good men before – the tormented, failed hunters Azura had once sent me to kill in mercy, for example.  Nor did I want to think that Lucien was risking harm for my sake.  That was too peculiar to contemplate.

“Don’t hurt him,” I said, and as it happened I said it to Lucien.  It could have gone either way.

Lucien spared me a glance over his shoulder, and Vicente smiled a little, which just then was an unpleasant thing.  “Don’t _hurt_ him,” Lucien echoed.  “He almost…and you have not gone.  You want to help, I suppose.”  He inhaled and exhaled loudly.  “So I finally have your loyalty to your Brothers at the least opportune time.  Very well then.  If you are going to stay, then you will have to do exactly as I say, or this may end very badly for all three of us.  Do you understand?”

I nodded, and then remembered that he could not afford to look away from Vicente again.  “Yes.”

“There are two hungers at work here.  You are willing to help assuage the lesser?”

After all, I had already considered that before I’d realized that the greater was in effect.  “Yes, I am.”

“You are a precious girl,” Vicente whispered, though he was still intently watching Lucien.

Lucien nodded.  “Then close the door.”  I did.  “In that cupboard there,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward it with his head, “are several vials of blood and one potion.  Fetch the potion and hold it ready for me.  Do not cross between us to get it.”

Easy enough.  I took a whiff of the potion to make sure I had gotten the right thing.  It smelled like a typical cure-all, but with whispers of exotic secondary ingredients that I could not place.  “I have it.”

“Good.  Now be very still and quiet until I ask for it.  _Very still and quiet._   Say it back to me so I know that you are paying attention.”

“Very still and quiet.”  I only had a second in which to feel vaguely insulted by his insistence.

Lucien nodded, and then, gracefully, deliberately, lowered the dagger.  “Now, Vicente.”

Almost faster than I could see Vicente fell upon our Speaker, knocking him back into the wall.  With a hungry groan he sank his teeth into the side of Lucien’s throat, pushing back enough of the hood to show a lock of dark brown hair.  Lucien winced for a moment; then his face slowly went slack as the narcotic effect of the bite took hold.  Vicente pressed close against him, and brought a hand up to cradle his head on the other side.  I could hear the long, deep swallows.

Thankfully I had trained extensively in being very still and quiet:  it kept me from crying out or rushing in to pry them apart.

They fell to their knees together, Vicente still sucking at Lucien’s neck, now with his free arm wrapped around his willing victim’s waist – both sighing, heavy-lidded.  It would have seemed like a lovers’ embrace if I could not see the life draining out of Lucien’s eyes, and his arms hanging limp, in seeming danger of losing even the strength to keep hold of his dagger.

Beyond what was necessary for a simple feeding, to the point of turning – and just shy of the point of death.  I began to wonder when I was going to disregard my orders and intervene, and what would happen to us all if I did.

Lucien mustered a weak shrug and push.  “Enough.  Enough!”  Vicente came up for air, though he seemed reluctant to let go completely.  He licked his teeth clean of the blood, gently kissed Lucien on the cheek and then the mouth, staining both with the blood he had failed to wipe from his lips.  As he nuzzled his victim’s ear, Lucien weakly raised his left hand to me, clenching and unclenching his fingers.  “Potion,” he mumbled.

I stooped and raised the bottle to his mouth, pouring slowly as he drank.  I heard his breath grow less shallow, and his dark eyes turned toward me less clouded than they had been a moment before.  “Yes,” he whispered at last.  “I admit it is useful to have someone on hand for that.  Thank you.”

I rose for a moment – it was not far away to some water and a cloth for the wound – and that allowed me to conceal the smile.  _Thank you!_   More humanity than I had ever expected from him.

“You always reject me too,” Vicente muttered reproachfully at Lucien, between kisses, while I busied myself.  “You always stop me just short.”

Lucien scoffed, weakly.  “If you turned me I wouldn’t be edible any more.  We couldn’t keep doing this.  Then what fun would you have?”  But he was returning the kisses with more conviction as his strength returned.

I knelt again and tentatively reached to push back the hood, for better access to the wound.  He did not protest:  instead, he leaned his head back against the wall with a sigh and closed his eyes.  His hair was short but not cropped, and tousled by its time under the hood.  I could see a faint network of scars on both sides of his neck – most were probable bites, except for a straight one tracing the collarbone that had more likely come from a poorly aimed blade.

I washed the fresh bite quickly and then pressed the clean side of the cloth against his neck to staunch the bleeding, working a little healing magic over it into the bargain.  In doing so, I came between the two men, and I could feel Vicente’s attention starting to turn toward me, less ravenous now but amorous in a way that was still not entirely human.  He brought his face close to my raised arm, inhaled as if he was breathing me in.  “You are so good, Methusiele,” he whispered, and brought his right hand to my shoulder, leaving his left on Lucien.  He was coming closer, lips slightly parted, as if to kiss me – or –

Lucien jerked him back from me.  “No,” he said, his voice stronger now.  “No, no.  Your lips will not touch her.  They are too close to your _teeth._ ”

Vicente glanced at him sidelong, both lucid and depraved enough to be playful.  “She’ll think you’re jealous, Lucien.”

No.  No, that was not what I was thinking at all.

“She can think what she likes,” Lucien growled, “but it is an order, and you will follow it on your oath to Sithis.”  Vicente bowed his head, sulking, until Lucien added, “But do as you like with your hands.”

Vicente looked at me, his eyes still gleaming red.  I had stayed after being told to leave:  I had agreed to this.  I raised Lucien’s left hand to the cloth so he could hold it, although my spell had stopped the bleeding; then I shifted to face Vicente and opened my blouse for him.  He stared, breath jagged, and it occurred to me what a cruel first sight throat and chest were for a vampire who had been denied use of his mouth.  What else could I have done?  Started at the pants, when I was kneeling?

He stroked his fingers slowly down the sides of my neck, and his fingers, though cool, were a little warmer than I’d grown accustomed to – because he was freshly fed, I realized.  It was Lucien’s warmth I felt in him.  That was a disconcerting thought.  I looked to Lucien’s face to reanchor myself – also disconcerting – and found him coming to kneel behind Vicente.  Pulling the vampire’s vest open from behind, and then his shirt.  His skin was so white it almost luminesced.

His hands wandered down to my breasts and cupped them.  “Lucien,” he muttered.

Lucien was kissing his way across Vicente’s shoulder, his hands sliding down his pale, bare sides.  Lucien’s eyes, though, were locked with mine.  “Yes?”

Thumbs sliding over my nipples.  “I will try to keep my oath.  But you must help me.  She is so tempting, and the two of you together – ”

Lucien pulled the dagger again and brought it around in front of Vicente, pressing their bodies together but also pressing the flat of the dagger against the vampire’s abdomen.  He purred the threat like an endearment.  “I am watching.”  He gave me a thoughtful look, then ran the tip of his tongue up Vicente’s neck.  “Methusiele.  We established, didn’t we, that you could bring your destructive talents down to a reasonable level?”  He smirked a little.

He meant the encounter with Antoinetta.  I’d been right.  “Yes.”

“Fire, then.  Keep him honest for a moment.”  I raised my hands and let little tongues of flame dance across my fingertips, and Lucien lowered the dagger and moved to – to remove his hood, and his clothes.  He was wiry, and covered with a faint panoply of scars from wounds that had been healed poorly or too late.  I could not decide whether I felt jealous that Vicente had been considered “worthy” of this trust before I had, or pleased that I had been brought to that level now, or mortified that either of the other two feelings should be present.  That I wanted to let go of my spell and my focus on Vicente and explore those scars with my hands and my mouth.

Not that Vicente was being unpleasant company, now that he was more under Lucien’s control.  He unfastened my pants, ran a hand down between my legs and stroked there softly, almost reverently.  I bucked my hips a little and tried not to lose my concentration.

Lucien returned to his place, wrapped around Vicente with the dagger resting gently at his stomach.  “Take them off, then,” he said over the vampire’s shoulder.  I shook off the magicka from my fingers and stood to pull the pants down over my hips.  I saw and I _felt_ Lucien staring at the hair he had remarked on the last time we’d been together.  He wanted me, too.  But we could not afford to turn our attention away from the lovely creature between us that might accidentally kill us both if given too much leash.

Lucien pulled Vicente’s head back roughly by the hair, provoking a throaty chuckle.  They fell back together, and Vicente ended up on his back on the floor, Lucien kneeling behind him faced toward me.  They stared intently into each other’s eyes as Lucien said to me, “Now his.”  I obliged, and then rubbed a little at the dark smattering of hair around Vicente’s root, and he gasped and arched his back.  Lucien was tracing the dagger along the base of Vicente’s throat, and without looking up at me, he said, “Mount.”

I did.  I brought myself down over Vicente and guided him into me, and he grabbed at my hips and urged me into the rhythm he wanted.  I raked my nails across his chest:  he groaned happily.  With his lips parted in desire his fangs were unpleasantly prominent – a sentiment that Lucien perhaps shared, because he bowed down to bury them in kisses.  Vicente’s slight coolness made him feel particularly hard within me, and we both sighed together, which made him dig his fingers into my flesh and thrust faster for a moment.  But then he deliberately slowed himself, and moved one hand up to Lucien’s face to separate them.  “Let me kiss her,” he whispered.

“No.”

He growled.  “Lucien.  I will not bite her.  I just want – ”

Lucien pressed just a little harder with the dagger.  “I know what you want,” he snarled.  “And I know that I can’t trust you not to take it.  You will not taste any part of her.”

The hand Vicente had on Lucien’s face moved up and back along his torso.  “Then you have to give me something.  Distract me.”  He made a teasing curl in the air with his tongue.  Lucien moved forward to straddle his head, and Vicente rolled his head back in a practiced-looking motion and swallowed Lucien whole.

Lucien fell forward onto his hands, gasping.  I grabbed up the dagger – our protection – and held it myself against Vicente’s side as I rode.  Lucien looked up at me, wild eyed, grabbed for my head and pulled me into a ferocious kiss that reverberated though my whole body.  I squealed and clenched, and shifted my hips forward to take Vicente deeper, and all the while our lips and our tongues remained locked together.  It was hard to keep our rhythms coordinated, but it was not long before all pretense of rhythm dissolved anyway.  They came within seconds of each other, and both the kiss and Vicente’s grasp gentled and then fell away.  Lucien and I sat down on either side of Vicente, who lay with his eyes closed, seeming relaxed for the first time since I had arrived in the room.

“Is it safe now?” I asked quietly.

“Almost,” said Lucien.  “Get dressed, and I will take care of the rest.  Wait for me outside the door.”

As I collected my things, Lucien went to the cupboard and brought out one of the vials of blood, then helped Vicente sit up and handed it to him.  “Drink,” he said.  “Keep drinking until you are completely calm.  Use all of them if you need to; I will bring you more.”

“Mm.  Thank you, Lucien.”  Vicente’s voice was weaker, but more lucid, than it had been.  “But poor Methusiele – I should – ”

“Apologize another time, when you are yourself.  Drink, and rest.”

I slipped outside quietly and waited.  I spent the time considering how grateful I was to Lucien.  Either way it might have gone, another few minutes between just me and Vicente would have ended with one of us dead and the other in violation of the Tenets – and thus hunted to death as well.  Lucien had saved both of our lives.

It was not long until Lucien emerged, robes and hood back in place, covering the scars from both his battles and his sacrifices for his Sanctuary.  I smiled at him, and he looked surprised.  “Thank you,” I said.

He backed me into the wall – slowly: he was still a little bit drained – and kissed me there for a long moment, stroking my hair.  Then he rested his head against my shoulder and sighed in relief and weariness.  I brought one hand up behind him, touched his back.  “It was lucky that you were there.”

He snorted.  “ _Luck_ had nothing to do with it.  It…was not the first time he and I had this conversation about you.  I was watching for this.”

Ah.  “Then it would have been easier to calm him if I had gone when you asked.”

“Most likely.  You are both expensive pets to keep.”  He sighed again.  “You will say nothing of this.”

“Of course not.”

He brought his hands down to my hips.  “Everyone else believes that the bottled blood keeps him content.  If they think otherwise they will stop trusting him.  They will not feel safe here.”

I hesitated.  “Are they safe?”

_“They_ are, yes.  _You_ will be reporting directly to Ocheeva from now on, and you will not allow him to be alone with you.”

“But _you_ will.”  I touched the side of his neck, and he took hold of my hand.

“I am the Speaker,” he said, lifting his head to look into my eyes.  “It is my responsibility.  I forbid you any further part of it.”  He smiled a little.  “But you did well.  You are showing many of the traits we look for in our leadership, you know.”

I frowned.  “I do not want to lead.”

“I know.  And in fact I did not plan to make it known.  I will not give you up to be someone else’s Silencer.”

The words would be truer and less fortunate than I could have imagined.

 


	6. Death and Living Reconciled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Methusiele learns to lie, flees a painful omen, and kills lots of people.

Ocheeva acknowledged the change to our chain of command by asking me for a personal favor:  I hunted down and killed an Argonian who had served in the Shadowscales along with her and Teinaava, but who had deserted.  I did it gladly, out of both established fondness and my feelings about desertion.  I brought her his heart.  An Argonian does not smile, exactly, but her mouth widened and her eyes narrowed in what I knew was glee as she put it in a little box to keep among her things.  She gave me a proper contract and I set off at once.  Vicente carefully avoided me the whole time.

Ocheeva’s contracts were all very comfortable in terms of the targets – mercy killings, in a way.  People who were already dying or, in some sense, killing themselves.  Admittedly, Faelian the skooma addict was a bit of a problem, in that he was in Talos Plaza, dangerously close to the parts of the Imperial City that were most painful.  I was better this time at invoking the ice of Sithis against the ghost voice in my head that kept beckoning toward the Temple District and insisting that I was still _Tavi_ , but even so, I felt the temptation to join Faelian in one last good binge before I killed him.  I slit his throat quickly and fled home to more comfortable contracts.

The actual killing was starting to come naturally.  It no longer felt like such a tremendous change from what I had done in my old life.

I had just come back from poisoning a fatally ill warlord when Vicente worked up the courage to talk to me, out in the dining room where the skeletal guardian paced, defending us against having too much privacy for comfort.  His eyes did not meet mine, but he approached me.  “Methusiele.  I must apologize.  My behavior toward you was…most unbecoming.”

“I understand.  I do not hold it against you.”

“Thank you.  And thank you for your discretion.  It is only…” he seemed diminished and sad.  “It is…lonely to know that you and Lucien will die before me.  But you are both here because you _want_ to die before me.”  He sighed.  “I will not ask you again.  If you ever change your mind, the door will be open.”

I was sorry for him.  I was also quite sure I was following Lucien’s order never to be alone with him again, because my mind was not going to change.  “Thank you, Vicente.”

With that, I retreated to Ocheeva’s quarters, where she gave me a beautiful black dress and informed me that my contract was to go to a party in Skingrad and kill everyone there.

The idea made me smile.  Old times.  “Does that mean I can blast them all at once?”

Ocheeva clucked her tongue at me.  “No, silly girl, that won’t do.  Everyone would know it was you if you left them all smoldering husks.  You’ve learned more subtlety than that – use it.  Kill them one by one.”  She touched me playfully under the chin.  “Take your time.  Enjoy yourself.”

I stood and thought for a moment.  “How am I going to keep from being found out?  Won’t it look a little odd that I’m the only survivor of this whole party?”

“You will have to make it seem as though you’re in town on other business, of course.  It won’t be a public affair:  you’ll just have to cover your entrance and exit from the manor with some caution."

So I packed my things and made a grand display of going out as the Arch-Mage for a visit to Skingrad’s Guild hall, and as usual, notable persons of Cheydinhal bade me good journey.  For the first time, one of them wished for me that “The Dragonborn watch over me.”

That name had once referred to the whole bloodline of the Emperors, but it was becoming a name for Martin specifically.  I’d noticed on my visits to the Imperial City that he had begun to gain something of a cult of his own.  I had done my best to avoid them so far, but evidently the mood of religious revival was spreading.  At least they were calling him “The Dragonborn,” which allowed me that small remove by not being what I had called him.  The avatar of Akatosh, sent to be the eternal protector of Tamriel.  Splendid.

I hoped very much that he would _not_ watch over me.  If he was watching over me, that would mean that he was watching me murder people and have sex with assassins and vampires – watching me ascend in the ranks of the Dark Brotherhood from which he had wished he could protect me.  That he knew now exactly what kind of creature he had trusted with his heart before his assumption into Aetherius.  It might make him fall from grace, like Meridia.  Or it might make him hate me.

_Don’t look down.  Forget me._

Skingrad was a better hall to visit than Chorrol:  its specialty was mine, destruction.  We gloried in our power over the elements and taught each other novel combinations and applications.  Then I made plausible noises about exploring nearby ruins for a couple of days, as was known to be an old habit of mine, so that no one would wonder where I had gone.

I wore a cape with a deep hood as I walked through the rain to Summitmist Manor, to obscure my identity.  A well-dressed Nord with white hair greeted me at the door with a wicked smile.

“We have the same Mother, you and I,” he muttered, slipping something cold into my hand.  “Here is the key:  no one else has one.  They believe they are playing a game, searching for hidden gold in the house, and that the door is locked only until someone finds it.  I wish I could join you, but I am only here to guard the door.”

“Guard it well, Brother.  We wouldn’t want anyone leaving prematurely.”  I kissed him on the cheek and opened the door.  As it closed behind me and I drew back my hood, a short old woman approached me from the nearby stairs.

“Altmeri!” she cooed.  “Well, aren’t we an assortment!  I _am_ glad there will be someone else of some culture here.  You will not believe that some of the guests could have been invited into such a nice house.  That filthy Nord, and,” her voice dropped to a near-whisper, “and that little _Dunmer_ girl.”

So I knew why someone might want this one dead, anyway.

“My name is Matilde Petit, dear,” she went on.  “And who are you, exactly?”

She annoyed me:  it just came out.  “I am the assassin who was sent to kill you.”

Her eyes widened for just a second, and then she laughed.  “Oh!  Oh dear!  You are _too_ funny.  Why, you’re the Arch-Mage, aren’t you?  I’d heard you were in town!  What a delight to meet someone of your importance.”

Some sleeping faculty awoke in me, and instead of fuming I smiled and laughed with her as I removed and hung my cloak.  “Of course I’m the Arch-Mage.  Forgive my strange sense of humor – blame the company of scholars and wizards.”

She waved away my apology and started to babble at me as if we were best friends, mostly dreadful revealings of her attitudes on the race and class of the other guests.  A dreadful, trampish little Dunmer girl; the good, rich Imperial boy in danger of being caught in her snares; the loutish, drunken Nord; and the exotically handsome Redguard, a retired member of the Imperial Legion.

I made a mental note of the last one especially.  He might prove problematic.

We went together up the first flight of steps, where the other guests were waiting.  “Finally!” said the Imperial boy – Primo, she’d called him.  “Does this mean we can start searching?”

I made the face a lovely woman makes when she pretends to be sad in order to get something.  “But you have all had time to get to know each other, and I have just now arrived.  Surely you can spare me a moment to settle in before we start?”

“Oh, of course we can!” Matilde chimed in behind me.  “The money’s not leaving without us, is it?  We’ll all agree on when we should start.  This is the _Arch-Mage_ , everyone!  Oh, dear, please remind me of your name?  I can’t just be calling you ‘the Arch-Mage.’  Who knows how long we’ll be here.”

It took a few seconds to beckon to mind the name they needed.  “Tintaviel.”

So I made a quick tour of the other guests, drinking and chatting as if I were a friendly, good-natured creature.  It was not difficult to speak to each of them privately, since most of them did not seem to like each other enough to be unwilling to break away with me alone.  I started with Neville, the retired soldier.  He was less overtly objectionable than Matilde, though a bit stodgy.  He disliked everyone but Matilde, who he felt sorry for because, although she was from a noble house, she had lost her fortune and was here because she was desperate to regain her wealth and thus her access to upper class society.  He particularly didn’t like the Nord, Nels. 

I went to Nels next, to see if the feeling was mutual.  If anything, Nels hated Neville more, because he hated the Imperial Legion generally for old war crimes in Skyrim.  But he liked the Dunmer girl, who reminded him vaguely of his dead daughter.  All good to know.

The Dunmer girl was named Dovesi, and she seemed to be as naïve a young thing as I could imagine.  She confided in me that she was smitten with Primo, and once we had grown familiar over a few sips of wine and well-placed giggles, she begged me to find out if he was attracted to her.

He was, so I could tell her that much in all honesty.  I added on my own the part about how, when we broke ranks to start searching, he wanted to meet her privately in the room he’d been assigned.  Then I announced to everyone my gratitude for the chance to mingle and unwind, and suggested that we begin.  All the guests wandered off in different directions, which was going to make my job absurdly easy.  Dovesi went with me up another flight of stairs to the bedrooms, chatting and giggling the whole way.  I must stay and give her courage until he arrived, if he was not there yet, she said.

I stayed and slit her throat.  My near-dead conscience stirred a little as I cleaned my blade on her dress.  She’d seemed a harmless enough thing.  And though my sudden facility for deceit was making things easier, it also made me uncomfortable.  It was an ancient part of me, a part I’d left behind with the Ayleids, and I was not sure I wanted it back.

As it happened, Primo went up not long after I’d left and discovered the body, sending a panic through the house.  That made things a little bit trickier, but on the other hand, the others immediately started to turn on each other, and that could be turned to my advantage easily enough.  I listened sagely to Nels’s accusations against Neville and forgave him his impulse to get drunk over it.  I suggested that he keep an eye on the soldier.  I would continue the search on both of our behalves, and give him half – I didn’t need the money, I was the Arch-Mage!  I’d just been here for _fun_ , and now, what a dreadful thing to happen.  I could defend myself, naturally, but I feared for Nels.

Then I went and feared for Primo, who was a bit crushed by the death of the girl he’d been hoping to bed.  I might have gone after him next, for the sense of romance, but Matilde attached herself to my arm and declared that she was not going to let me out of her sight again. 

Very well, then.  I would help her search and keep her safe.  At least until we found ourselves alone in the basement, and I could stab her.  I decided that this time I would find the body, and I ran back up the steps shouting.

I was glad I’d decided to use the dagger, and that Ocheeva had insisted on my training toward weapons and away from spellwork:  it never seemed to dawn on anyone that the Arch-Mage would kill with anything but magicka.  Suspicion flew in every direction except towards me.  Neville stormed down into the basement to investigate more closely:  Nels settled in at the bar with his sword drawn, drinking and muttering dangerously to himself.

How deliciously easy they were making it for me.

I fretted prettily at Primo about how nervous I was about the whole affair, how I didn’t quite trust either of the other two men, and how I hoped he would agree to stay near me.  As I thought, as the youngest and most sheltered of the men, he was the easiest to lead in that direction.  He didn’t see an Arch-Mage, he saw a pretty girl.  Of course I was frightened:  of course I wanted a handsome young man to protect me.

And once he was dead, it was nothing to turn Nels and Neville against each other once and for all.  Nels had enough pure rage to win against Neville, but not against me.

I strolled one last time through the house to see if there was anything I wanted to take, as I had been invited to do.  My feelings about the whole contract were strangely complicated.  I’d embraced this work, hadn’t I?  Embraced Lucien, having learned how much of himself he gave for us, for me?

A shame he wasn’t here.  He was so good at driving everything else out of my mind.  It would have felt good.

The lying.  It must be the lying that was bothering me.  I resolved not to take that route again.  Silent sneaking was better.  I put on my cloak and walked back out into the rain.

Back in Cheydinhal, Ocheeva told me that more rain was in my future:  the next contract was in Leyawiin.  But before we discussed that further, she said, she was empowered to give me a special blessing from the Night Mother.  She laid her hands on my head, and I felt the energy come down – a strange little chill that made me feel slightly sick.

The target was a retired Imperial Legionnaire who had been particularly troublesome to the Dark Brotherhood.  Knowing that we would want to retaliate, he was kept under constant guard, and still lived in the barracks in Leyawiin rather than a private residence.  He was almost constantly armed.  But M’raaj-Dar and Telaendril had prepared something special for him, guaranteed to pierce the armor and to kill in one stroke:  an enchanted arrow.

I took it with unhidden skepticism.  “You should have told them I don’t shoot bows.  What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Be creative,” she said, shrugging.

Once he was dead, I was to _cut off one of his fingers_ and deliver it to the Legion captain in the Imperial City.  The one with his Legion ring on it, she said.  (Why did that bother me?  I had cut out the Argonian traitor’s heart, and several daedric hearts before that.)

M’raaj-Dar and Antoinetta were home while I was there, making dinner.  I took the garlic away from her and replaced it in the chest where she kept her private things, reminding her again of Vicente’s allergy.  She flirted with me in response and I had to ignore her.

“Thank you for the arrow,” I said to M’raaj-Dar.  “You seem to be good at enchantments.  Maybe you and I should – ”

“This isn’t the Mage’s Guild,” he growled.  “I don’t answer to you, Madame Arch-Mage.”  I let the matter go.

It was actually _not_ raining in Leyawiin.  It was merely overcast.  Dagail, the head of the local Guild, greeted me warmly; but as we made our pleasant initial small talk her eyes glazed over, and she took me by the shoulders and pulled me close to whisper in my ear.

“ _Sanguine’s son does not condemn Mephala’s daughter.  The Dragon waits._ ”

I felt ill.  “What?”

Dagail looked at me curiously, her eyes normal again.  “Did I say something?  Oh my, was it something troublesome?  Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.  I do not.”  I pulled free from her.  I did not quite understand what it was she had meant, but the utterance had been full of names I did not want to hear or speak again.  Blasted mystics.

But of course, we had to hold an entire seminar on blasted mysticism.  Oh, certainly, telekinesis was an amusing trick, and absorbing and reflecting spells were both very useful skills.  But then they insisted on debating the nature of the soul, its origin and its fate.  And among the mystics, the difference between aedra and daedra was much more stark and clear:  they had been cut from different cloth at the very beginning of things, from order and from chaos.  They were the opposites between which the whole world was stretched out.

This time I only sat and listened, sullen in my sense of justification.  Never the twain would meet, even if a seer cruelly echoed the last words Tamriel’s savior had ever said to me.  Even so.  The Dragon could wait all it wanted, and it would change nothing.

The Dragon _was not_ waiting.  My contract was.

Adamus was under constant guard and almost constantly armored, except to swim and to sleep.  Useless.  I would have to create my own opportunity.

I took what appeared to be a casual stroll so that I could happen upon him swimming.  I was sure to wear the official robes of the Arch-Mage so there would be no question as to who I was.  Once I arrived, I stood and watched until he noticed me.  He stood, grinned, and brought a hand idly to the back of his neck in what would have been a fetching gesture in his prime.  He was too old for my liking, but at least his work had kept him fit.

“Arch-Mage!” he called, and his guard turned and gawked at me as he climbed up out of the water.  “I’d heard you were visiting Leyawiin.  I am Adamus Phillida.”

“Oh my!  The retired captain.  You are quite famous in the Imperial City.  I’m afraid Hieronymus Lex doesn’t hold a candle to you.”

He beamed at the flattery.  “Actually, I hear he may end up shipped off to Anvil.  I never cared for the man.”

It was not difficult to get myself invited along to dinner.  There, I continued to laugh and beam and flatter.  When the mood seemed right, I leaned close to him and suggested what a pity it was that we could not have any privacy.  He swallowed the bait eagerly, telling me that there was a vacant house in town, and that he would meet me there at ten that night.  He had not been a law officer for so long and not learned how to shake off surveillance, he joked.

I put on something pretty, arrived early, and secreted my other tools away in a remote corner.

He was prompt, and visibly relieved that I had actually come to meet him.  And still wearing full armor.

I laughed.  “Do you wear it to sleep?  It must be uncomfortable.”

“I have powerful enemies, and we do not all have your abilities.  I have to be careful.”

I smiled, nodded.  “Yes, of course…but still.”  I traced one finger along a metal seam.  “ _This_ isn’t quite as interesting, is it?”

A happy sigh, full of the hope of things to come.  “It was only to get here safely.  Will you help me out of it?”

Of course I would:  that gave me access to bare skin faster.  I sucked the life out of him through my fingertips, as quickly as I could.  I did not really want to spend too long watching him realize what had happened.

Why did he _bother_ me so much?  Just because he’d been in the Legion?  As if that was by definition a sign of high virtue?  Of course there was the lying again, and the choice of spell.  I couldn’t help that:  it was the best way to get him vulnerable and kill him without leaving a mark or attracting attention.  These might be things I preferred not to do, but I had to grow in my craft.  I had to accept the needs of the contract and meet them.

I retrieved the special arrow and the cheap bow I’d acquired, and shot his corpse point-blank in the neck.  Then I stooped to remove his glove and sever the ring finger from his hand.  I wasn’t familiar with butchery, and had to work a bit to get through the joint.  More uncomfortable growth.

I’d taken a calculated risk in being seen talking to him in public, so I did not hurry out of town the next day.  I was, indeed, investigated for the crime, and there was a bit of a sensation over it.  We appeared in the Black Horse Courier.  I’d been one of the last people with him, after all, and there’d still been a whiff of magicka at the scene when he was found.  But the local mages objected strenuously:  the spell they’d thought was used verged close to necromancy, and my feelings about necromancy were well known throughout my Guild.  And there’d been a similar enchantment on the arrow, reason enough to suspect a false reading.  And I was also known to despise bow and arrow.

I cooperated fully, answered questions politely, and accepted the help of my fellow mages with just enough hesitation to seem noble.  I was beginning to actively dislike myself when the Leyawiin guards finally acknowledged that there seemed to be no decisive evidence that I had been involved, and let me go.

This time the Imperial City was comparatively merciful.  It felt as if…as if my memory stood back a step from me and only watched, sad but quiet.  As if I’d taught the awful voice in my head to fear disturbing me.  It was strange.  I wondered if it meant I was beginning to lose my grief.  Then I wondered if that made me happy or unhappy.

Dread Father.  Did _anything_ make me happy?  Could I _be_ happy?

I planted the finger in the new captain’s desk, then fled the silence with just as much discomfort as I normally fled the voice.

 


	7. Heaven Sent You to Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The order to kill the new friends she'd used to replace her dead friends tests the limit of Methusiele's tolerance and Lucien's control. (sex chapter)

Ocheeva was excited to have me home.  I had a sealed letter from Lucien.  This was an odd event, since for any casual purpose he could just come and speak to us himself.  She told me how important this must be, and reminded me of the sanctity of sealed orders:  they were not to be revealed even to her.

I took it back to my house to read it.

_I confess great delight in the way that you continue to advance.  You are needed now by the Black Hand itself, in a matter of great importance to the entire Dark Brotherhood.  Come as soon as you have disposed of this letter to my private refuge in Fort Farragut – it is in the forest northeast of you.  Only here will we have enough privacy to discuss the situation frankly.  That is crucial, Methusiele – do not discuss this message or reveal my location to anyone else from the Sanctuary.  This is much more important than the note you showed to Antoinetta.  Be discreet!_

_Also be mindful.  I have several skeletons like the one that guards the Sanctuary, and as I do not perform the enchantment myself, I cannot teach them to recognize you. – LL_

I burned the note and set out immediately.  The fort was a ruin to all outward appearances, stranded in a lovely patch of woods that smelled of pine.  I considered the prospect of blasting my way through skeletal guardians with a warm nostalgia, but then wondered if Lucien would be unhappy for me to destroy them. 

The Sanctuary had another way in, through the well.  Perhaps the pattern held true.  Yes – after a few minutes of searching, I found the trap door in the hollow of an old dead tree.

His room was well-furnished to a modest taste, though clearly oriented toward business:  on tables, alchemical equipment and the sorts of ingredients useful for poisons, a few bits of light armor and daggers.  But at another table a bottle of wine, and there Lucien sat waiting, already facing me.

He was wearing pants and a shirt with a high collar, to hide his scars.  But no robes, no hood.  He smiled.  “Good, I was hoping you would find that entrance.  Now I won’t have to reset any of the traps.”

“You wouldn’t have disarmed them for me?” I smirked.

“Surely you would not need me to do that.”  He rose to his feet.  “Join me for a drink.”

“I thought I was here for important business.”

“You are, but we have time.”  He came to me and touched a hand to my cheek.  “I want you to have a moment to realize that you have me in my private chamber, unrobed.  I want it to dawn on you how far you have come into my trust.”

I shivered a little.  It _was_ impressive, from him.  I tried to will away the blush.  “Very well.  If you say we have time for a drink first, then I will join you.”

I glanced at the space behind me, where the ladder came down into the room.  There was an empty crypt there.  “For when Vicente stays over?”

He smirked.  “Never mind about Vicente.  Have a seat.”

We sat down at the table, and he poured for me.  The taste of the wine was rich and strange.  From Morrowind, he said.  He drank with me, and poured second cups for us both.

“Among your many conquests,” he said, “who was your favorite kill?”

That was easy.  “Mankar Camoran.  If I’d had the time, I would have done like a Bosmer and eaten his heart.”  As he grinned at my answer, I asked a question of my own.  “When did you start following me?”

He waved his hand gracefully.  “Very well, if you must.  I saw you leave the Imperial Prison.  We’d known of the passage, but it had always been blocked.  I was interested to know about the woman who opened it.”  He laughed a little.  “You know, one of those bandits you killed in Vilverin was going to be Antoinetta’s contract.  That’s why I happened to be there.”

“How in the world have you had the time to keep such close track of me?  Surely you have other duties as a Speaker.”

“I have a very fast horse and skilled subordinates.”  But he frowned at that, and amended it.  “I was not always with you.  I stayed close when your location was convenient to my other responsibilities.  When I had to leave you, rumor was usually sufficient to let me find you again easily enough.  More?” he added, glancing into my empty cup.

I laughed.  “Are you trying to get me drunk?”

The cold smile in return, the one that did not reach the eyes.  “No.”

But I did feel peculiar – not just tipsy, but something else.  Something… I raised a hand to cast a light for myself, and it sputtered.  A puny flicker for a few seconds, and that was all.

He nodded.  “An effect of the wine, you see.  It’s damaging your ability to connect to magicka.  I imagine you feel it much more than I do.  It will go away in a couple of hours.”  He took my cup from me and set it down on the table.  “I won’t tell you how expensive it was to find a vintage where the dosage was this high.”

I should have been angry.  I should have at least been on my guard.  At the time, I only thought, of course.  Of course he had thought of a way to neutralize me if he ever had to, like he had with Vicente.  Well prepared.  And after all, it was also wine on an empty stomach, and perhaps it was going to my head.  “Why did you feel this was necessary, Lucien?”

“Because I am going to tell you something that you are not going to like, and I know your temper.”

I could only think of one possibility.  “You’re sending me away?  You told me you wouldn’t give me up to be someone else’s Silencer.”

He grinned, and it was more genuine, if a little bit bloodthirsty.  “No indeed.  You are going to be _my_ Silencer.”  He punctuated it with a light kiss.

I smiled, gladdened at the thought that I was that important to him.  “I told you I did not want to lead,” I chided.  He kissed me again.  “But,” I said, “that hardly makes me angry enough to go to this much effort.”

“No, that won’t.  The problem will arise when I give you your first assignment.”  He sighed and leaned back in his chair, hands folding in front of him.  “Members of the Dark Brotherhood are being found dead, and we suspect that they are falling to one of our own.”  He waved two fingers of one hand to dismiss any concern for myself.  “You are not under suspicion.  It began before you joined us.  But… the evidence seems to point toward someone who underwent my training regime.  Someone from _my_ Sanctuary.”  He scowled, and I knew he took this as a personal affront.  He so prided himself on our loyalty.

“An oath breaker.  What would protect them from the wrath of Sithis?”

“I don’t know.  But the threat must be purged, Methusiele.  I must assign you to purify the Sanctuary for me.”

I felt cold.  “Purify it…?”

His face went hard.  “Kill them.  All of them.”  He rose and started pacing.

I couldn’t believe him, couldn’t process the information.  “Ocheeva?  Vicente?”

“All of them,” he repeated.  “We cannot take the chance.”

“But… I would have to break the Tenets myself.”

He stopped pacing for a moment to look at me.  “Purification has always been a special case, for emergencies.  For the purposes of this single task, I absolve you of the Fifth Tenet.”

He really was asking me to do this.  He really did mean for me to kill everyone in the “Family” he had so carefully trained me to love and to believe that he loved.  Everyone I had left in the world, except him.

And someday, given the right circumstances, he might just as easily turn on me as he had on my Brothers and Sisters.

I stood.  “No, Lucien.  I don’t want to do this.”

A mirthless chuckle.  “Of course you don’t.  I am not happy to require it of you, but I must.”

“You misunderstand me.  I _won’t._ ”

He stepped toward me, and our eyes locked.  “Careful, now, Methusiele.  I have not absolved you of the Third Tenet, only the Fifth.  You will follow my orders.”  He watched me step back, shaking my head, and held one of his hands out to me.  “I know how hard it is.  You will not be left all alone, you know.  You will be with me.”

_“Bastard!”_   Without thinking, I raised a hand to electrocute him.  My spell was a pathetic little thing – and what there was of it all rebounded on me, and I shrieked and dropped to my knees.

Lucien calmly knelt in front of me and tapped at a ring on his left hand with his thumb.  He’d reflected my spell with it.  “Tsk.  And you chose shock, of all things,” he purred.  “And you with both the Altmeri and the daedric weakness to it.  That must have hurt a great deal.”

I stared up at him.  How did he know –

“I was with you at Mephala’s shrine,” he said quietly, answering the unspoken question.  “Do you imagine that you have secrets from me?  Do you think she didn’t always mean for me to have you when the war was over?” 

Did I think that – did I – I could barely see for rage.  I howled and took a wild swing at him, which he caught and held easily.  His eyes were intense as he waited for me to cool down enough to listen.  “Understand me,” he whispered.  “If you disobey me, even if you manage to kill me, you _will_ have broken the Tenets, and they will come after you.  Including your own Family, the ones you think you are protecting.  They will not hesitate.”

Even now I didn’t want to kill him:  but I did want to hurt him.  “Well.  Except for the traitor.”

His fingers dug into my wrist.  “Do you want to see me angry?  Is that it?”  He jerked me toward him, whispered through his clenched teeth.  “Are you quite sure?”

“Let me go,” I snarled, pulling against his grip.

He threw me aside, rose, and strode angrily into the center of the room, between the rope ladder I’d come down and the closed gate that led to the rest of the old fort.  “There!” he shouted.  “Where are you going to go?  Through the guardians, without your spells?  Or are you going to come and fight me for the ladder?”  He tore off his shirt and threw it down, revealing the abstract network of pale scars across his chest, and then stood with his arms open in a challenge to come forward.

There was no way for me to win this kind of fight with him.  I briefly considered whether I would be quick enough to pull the lever for the gate and get my ring on before he could catch me.  I couldn’t fight the guardians, but if I could stay hidden – oh, certainly.  Hidden while disarming traps and hunting my way through territory the man chasing me would know much better. 

No escape and no victory – and a horrible realization that I didn’t care anyway.  The intensity in his eyes was…was _enticing_ , and some sick part of me wanted to find out how much farther I could push him.

I rose, as calmly as I could, and took off the robe I was wearing over my traveling pants and shirt.  Robes were no good for grappling.  He waited grinning as I folded it in half and hung it over the back of a chair.  Then, with distressing artlessness, I rushed him headlong.  He stepped casually to the side and left one fist behind to meet my stomach.  Stood and waited for me to catch my wind.  In a better show of skill I spun with a hand raised to strike at his face, but he intercepted it and twisted me further into my own spin until he had my arm behind my back.  He wrenched it into a debilitating angle, and I fell to my knees again, howling in pain.  He took hold of my elbow with his other hand to hold me in place.

“There, you see,” he rasped down at me, “I’m not as pretty when I’m angry as you are.  Now, are you going to behave, or am I going to keep hurting you?”

I swept a leg back to try to knock him over, but didn’t quite have the strength or the angle to do it.  He turned my wrist a little further, sending another spasm of pain up through it.  I heard the little crack that meant that, if he chose to move it any further, the wrist would break.  I tried to twist my way back out of the lock, failed, clawed wildly back toward his face with my free hand.  When he raised a hand to block that I flailed almost free of him – but he still had a hold of my shirt, and he clutched at it and tore it from my shoulders, then tried to tangle it around my arms behind me.  I wriggled free of that too, and started trying to crawl just a little bit away from him, to get the space to use my legs.  The nerves of my arm were still shrieking, and I had to favor the other side.  For a second I was free:  then there was a hand at my scalp, a hard tug back by my hair.  He pressed down close against me, a small knife to my throat.

“Cheater,” I panted.

“There’s no such thing as cheating.”  He grabbed my shoulder and flipped me over onto my back, then pressed the knife against my throat again and looked into my eyes.  His were burning.  “I’ve missed your anger,” he whispered.  “It’s gorgeous.”  With his free hand he reached down to unfasten my pants and pull them down.  My perversity chose the moment to rest, so he was able to make quick work of that, and then his own pants.  _Then_ , after he’d come back fully on top of me, I started pushing at him with the arm that still wanted to move.  Clawing at his face and kicking.

He laughed.  “Still?  Really?  Do you not believe that I would cut you?”  He dragged me toward the gate, leaned me against it, and, straddling me so that I could not get up, cut a strip from my shirt and used it to tie my one good hand to one of the metal posts.  The ones behind me dug into my back uncomfortably.  I started screaming and flailing with my legs. 

He slapped me hard enough to throw my head to the side and stun me into silence.  “Hush,” he whispered.  Then he adjusted so that he was kneeling with his legs between and beneath mine, and started to kiss me – and I still kissed him back, wanting more of both his sex and his anger.

Ah.  Here it was, the ruin he had promised me.  I could feel it finally pouring over me in waves.  I arched up against him, moaning, and he chuckled as he thrust into me.  I writhed in token protest but rolled my hips upward to welcome him in.  He worked one hand into my hair and wrenched my head back.

“You’re wet,” he breathed into my ear.  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”  I writhed again and groaned instead of answering, and he laughed softly.  “You’re perfect.”  He pumped harder, biting at my throat.

It was true.  I was enjoying it.  Hating him only seemed to make me want him, and wanting him this way made me hate him.  I sobbed, and that only pleased him more:  he brought down the hand that was pinning my unbound wrist and rubbed at my breast with it.  The residual pain in my wrenched hand made me flinch as I tried to move it, but I did – with the intention, at first, of pushing or striking.  Continuing at least the pretense that I was resisting him.  Instead I dug my nails into his back, clinging to him.  He smiled at me, smiled at my growls of scorn and need, kissed and pierced me deeper, delighted to see how fighting him had turned into fighting myself.

I wanted us both to die.  I wanted us both to die with him inside me, with his hands on my skin and his tongue in my mouth.  It was horrifying and wonderful, and it rushed through my body like fire as I clutched around him.  He hummed in pleasure, grabbed into my ass enough to hurt, his pace grown frantic.  Then erratic, and then he was still, and his grasp eased.

For a moment he did not move from above me, and my back hurt from all of our combined weight pressing back against the metal at this awkward angle.  He slowly got up, put his pants on, and walked away to one of the tables, leaving me still tied down by one wrist.  At the moment I was too tired, sore, and full of self-loathing to move to free myself, so I stayed where I was.  I didn’t even try to sit up in a more reasonable position.

He came back to me with a potion that smelled of restoration.  “You will need to be fresh for your work,” he said.  Then he held the bottle close to my mouth without pouring it, teasingly, and asked, “You are going to do your work, aren’t you?  You are ready to be a good girl?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“Whose are you?”

If my will had not been shattered at just that moment I might have said another name, and provoked him into beating me again or even killing me.  I did not have that much fight left in me.  “Lucien’s.”

He poured the healing potion into my mouth, and I swallowed it, and felt my various pains starting to fade.  He cut my wrist loose, and I sat up, regarding the ruin of my shirt.  He was decent enough to pace away for a moment, so that his back was turned as I crawled to where my pants were and pulled them on. 

“Lucien,” I asked, in as peaceful a voice as I could, “does Sithis take his children if they kill themselves?  Do they still win his presence?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder in cool bemusement.  Not angry.  “Ah, yes.  Everyone has to ask that question once, you know.  No, they don’t.  Suicide violates the Fifth Tenet.”  Then he realized the window that left for me, and turned to face me properly, more serious.  “And the Third, because I forbid you.”

I sighed in resignation and went to retrieve my robe.


	8. When Your Heart Grows Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Methusiele purifies the Sanctuary and is rewarded with a less frenetic exercise in bondage and discipline. And a horse. (sex chapter)

So I set off to kill all of my friends.

Murderers all, I reminded myself.  People who would have killed me had our places been reversed.  People no more inherently worthy of mercy than any of my other contracts, and probably less worthy than most of them.

I decided to start with Telaendril.  I’d spent the least time with her, so it would be the least traumatic place to begin.  Also, she was usually away on patrol, so it would take a while before anyone realized she was gone.  I shadowed her on the first leg of her usual tour, from Cheydinhal down to Leyawiin.  Halfway between the two, I scorched her to death with a hail of fireballs.  A bombardment of a common spell, rather than anything exotic that might be more traceable.  She never spotted me, which I found strangely delightful given the stereotype that she should have had an edge over me in the wilderness.

I left her where she lay.  Either she’d never be found, or she’d be mistaken for a bandit or the victim of a rogue conjurer.

Everyone else was home in the Sanctuary, welcoming me back with their usual odd combination of warmth and talk of murder.  I helped Antoinetta make dinner.  I added the spices myself, telling her I was making sure she didn’t add Vicente’s least favorite ingredient yet again.  Nothing too dreadful – they didn’t deserve to die of poison – just a sedative.  Less cruel in what I was accepting as my logic, and also less distinctive to the taste.

Over dinner several of them chatted about their latest contracts – I didn’t, of course, and after Antoinetta started to ask and Ocheeva cleared her throat meaningfully, they realized I couldn’t.  I put on my best false smile and tried not to start missing Ocheeva preemptively.

But then, as everyone started to fall tired and go off to their beds, I realized that M’raaj-Dar had never come out to eat with the rest of us.  I was going to have to seek him out separately – and first, since he was still going to be conscious.  I went down to the training room, and he greeted me… warmly.  _Very_ warmly, as if we’d really been best friends all along and he’d only been teasing me with his constant brusqueness.

Lightning for him, and more than was probably needed.  In my heart I was sure he was the one.  He’d turned suddenly friendly because he had some notion I’d been sent after him and wanted to save himself.  It was his fault this was happening.

I let myself wonder for a moment if this meant I could spare the rest of them.  I was _sure_ M’raaj-Dar was the traitor.  But no, my instructions had been quite explicit.  Everyone had to die.  The consequences of my being wrong would be too dire, and in any case I would be disobeying my orders.

I came glumly across to the living quarters, where my Brothers and Sisters lay soundly unconscious, and brought out my Blade of Woe.  One by one I gently bent back their heads and slit their throats.  Gogron first, and then Antoinetta, my least favorites.  Then poor Teinaava.

It wasn’t fair.  They should have had a chance to defend themselves.  – Really?  The chance we never gave anyone else?  The chance to look me in the face and call me a traitor when I was doing Lucien’s bidding?

I went to Ocheeva’s room.  I thought about how she had been the one who had pulled me back from the brink after my contract in Bruma.  I prayed to the Dread Father to receive her kindly as I executed her.

Only Vicente left, the worst one.  Lucien’s other favorite and mine, my mentor and friend, giver of a multitude of gifts and one dangerous sexual encounter.  Poor Vicente, who had lamented that Lucien and I would die so long before he did.  Only now it wasn’t true:  I told myself, as I stood over him trying to harden into the task, that I was sparing him that.

With everyone else, the cut had killed them quickly and easily.  But Vicente seemed to stir in protest, and in a panic I poured fire down through my hands and burned him beyond recognition.  And then stood there for several more minutes, sorry to have disfigured him that way.  I kissed his charred forehead and wished him peaceful rest.

Then I left the Sanctuary, never to return.

I spent the rest of the night in my house, contemplating the possibility of another wine and skooma binge.  No – as tempting as it sounded, it wouldn’t do.  I’d only end up forcing Lucien to come and find me drunk… and being drunk, I would also be weak, and Sithis only knew what he would do to me then.  I must maintain some semblance, some illusion of control over myself.  I sucked in what I could of the void, numbing myself, and with the little wave of nausea that preceded the cold came the realization of what my practice actually was – I was destroying my own soul, one tiny piece at a time.

Good.

At dawn I forced myself to take a quick nap, and then headed back to Fort Farragut to give my report.  He was making healing potions when I arrived.  As was my habit, I opened the conversation with warmth.

“You have ruined me.”

He chuckled but did not turn to face me.  “You flatter me.  You had told me I was incapable of that.  Do you remember?  At any rate,” he went on, putting stoppers into bottles as he talked, “I did not ruin you.  I _saved_ you.  Everyone hears the story, my dear.  You opened fire on a _Daedric Lord_.  Did you really think you could have taken him?”  He glanced over his shoulder at me.

“I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“That great a weapon, left with no hand to control it.  You would have destroyed yourself, and who knows what other harm you might have done in the process.  I may well have saved enough lives to balance all my life’s misdeeds.”  He snorted, and finally turned to face me.  I could see weariness in his face.  “Is it done or not?”

“It is done.”

He nodded and crossed the room to me, grabbed me into his arms with a surprising conviction.  Sighed into my hair, stroking it with one hand.  “They were my Family too, you know,” he murmured.  “I had no choice.”

That made some of the awful feelings come back, and I put my arms around him too, and we stood there wretched for some time.  I wished I knew how seriously to take his implied remorse.  After all, he’d had the choice to do it himself rather than to have _me_ do it.  Perhaps it had been because he’d known them for so much longer, had chosen most of them himself, and he couldn’t bear to actually wield the knife – perhaps that was it, if he had a human heart, although it would still be a selfish one.

Then again, it was still possible that he didn’t really care that much about it, and that making it my job also made it a test of how deep my loyalty had become.

Gods, I was so sick of being trapped in my own head.  I made a strangled noise into Lucien’s shoulder.  “I hate myself,” I whispered.  “I hate the way I feel.”

The hand in my hair started rubbing at the back of my neck.  “What do you want to feel?” he asked.  I didn’t answer.  He started to graze gently under my ear, pulling me tighter against him.  “What do you want to feel?”

I didn’t know.  I made a half-hearted and ineffective attempt to push him away, and he sighed.  “That’s what I thought.”  His lips came up to my ear, and his hands started roaming over my back.  “You like it to hurt a little – it draws the pain out of you.  But you don’t understand.  You don’t know how to ask.”

Part of me cursed him, but the part that was controlling my body whimpered and cuddled closer against him.

“I don’t think either of us has the energy for a repeat of the last time,” he smirked.  “But if you could actually be _obedient,_ I am sure I could think of other things to show you.”

The word _obedient_ always chafed me, and I was not quite ready to be responsible for actually asking Lucien to hurt me.  “Do as you like,” I said.  “You will anyway.”

He laughed quietly and kept kissing my neck.  “Do you really think of me as nothing but a monster?  What have I ever done except protect and please you?”

“You murder people.”

He nipped lightly at my shoulder.  “So do you.”

I could feel the tears coming.  “I know.  I’m a monster too.”

A playful growl.  “Dread Father.  You are going to be the death of me.”  He took my head in his hands and stared into my eyes.  “You refuse to ask it, but I will make you _say_ it.  Are you willing, or are you not?”

His eyes were full of the promise of a delectable species of harm.  “I am willing.”

He pulled my head forward and kissed me, slow but deep.  Nothing but that and caressing each other through the clothes for several moments before he started stripping me.  He actually let me be the one to remove his shirt, which was remarkable.  But he stopped my hands at his waist.  “Stay there,” he whispered, and walked away toward a box in the corner.

He came back with rope.  “Cross your arms behind your back.”  I looked at him nervously, and he raised his eyebrows in warning.  I cast my eyes down and did as I was told.  “Good,” he said, with a quick kiss.  “Now be still.”

It took some time for him to rig the harness binding my upper arms to my sides. Then a little more to tie my forearms so that they stayed crossed at the small of my back and the ropes met in a thick knotted handle between my shoulder blades.  I stood as still as I could bear, wondering what he meant to do once I was helpless and whether I really wanted to find out.  Feeling him brush the ropes along my skin, sometimes slowly and deliberately to make me shiver, sometimes with a second of startling harshness.

When the handle was finished, he tugged at it lightly twice and nodded.  “There,” he said.  Then he yanked down much harder and I fell onto my knees.  Back, and as I fell he caught me in his embrace and kissed me fiercely.  Before my imbalance could turn to panic he set me right again and knelt in front of me, brushing his fingertips lightly over my skin.

“Now,” he mused.  “What to do with you.”  Touching my face and my neck.  “Is binding enough by itself, do you think?”  Down my useless shoulders, so softly.  I trembled as his hands came forward onto my breasts.  He looked into my eyes and smiled.

“Or do you need it to _hurt?_ ” And with this he started to pinch my nipples, slowly, pleasantly at first – but he kept increasing the pressure and the sensation went over to pain.  My noises of protest only amused him, and he pinched harder, so I bit my lip against yelling.

Not that I tried to escape or make any real protest.  I accepted the treatment he gave me.

“You take to this quite well,” he grinned.  “I could go and get a knife – no,” he assured me when my eyes went round.  “No, if I went far enough to really make you afraid, you would have to fight me, wouldn’t you?  And then it would be very dangerous for us both.  We will stop at a bit of roughness, then.”  He pinched the right breast one more time, and dug in with his nails.  As I yelped he released it and brought his mouth down over it instead, rolling his tongue over it and sucking at it gently.  I bowed my head toward him and moaned.  I could already feel myself growing open and damp, eager for him to take me.

He dipped into me with his fingers and started to work his mouth up and down my neck, building again from pleasant to increasingly vehement.  Soon he was sucking and biting so hard that I was sure I would at least bruise:  I wondered if he would break the skin.  He seemed pleased by the way I shook and made piteous sounds.

“Do you like that?” he murmured.  “Do you wish I had let Vicente have his way with you?”

The mention of Vicente added a whole other variety of pain, but it only rolled itself in with the rest of the sensation, and I whimpered, and bounced to encourage his fingers to keep moving inside me.  Instead he pulled away from me to stand and take his pants off.  He pulled my head to his crotch and I opened my mouth for him.  He grabbed into my hair and controlled me by it, thrusting uncomfortably deep into my throat as I tried to relax it for him.  I could hear him gasping –

He yanked me back away from himself and then upward, forcing me to my feet, then kissed me as he reached back for the handle between my shoulder blades.  With that in hand he threw me toward the bed and told me to kneel before it.  He knelt behind me, reached around for my breasts, and bit me again on the side of the neck, hard.  After the few minutes of being left alone, the bruises there hurt more than ever for the renewed assault, and I shrieked.  He chuckled and pressed his hardened member between my cheeks.

“What do you think?” he rasped.  “Shall we try it without the salve?”

That was too close to my limit.  “No,” he answered immediately, and took a second to stroke more gently at my arms, to make me let go of the static charge he’d felt me trying to urge into my bound hands.  “That will wait until another day.”  He took hold of the handle again and pulled me back onto him, thrusting into the safer passage.  I whined and fell forward onto the bed as he pumped into me, controlling me with the ropes.

The gulf between external pleasure and internal pain was widening into a frightening expanse that threatened to swallow me whole.  I started trying to forget myself and focus on the sensations of the friction of his movement inside me, of the ropes against my skin.  Those I craved and moaned for:  unfortunately, my mind stayed awake, and used the craving and moaning to illustrate just how much of a monster I’d become.  I lowered my forehead onto the bed in defeat and tears, and he took it for another sort of surrender, and growled happily, and fell upon me wild for a moment, and came.

I stayed there motionless as he relaxed, stroked my hips gently, and began the process of freeing me from the harness.  My arms passed through an initial numb weakness into sharp tingles, and I pulled them up under me whimpering.  He gathered me up the rest of the way onto the bed and lay down beside me, pulling me into his chest.  I found that I was too exhausted not to relax against him, and we lay that way for some time. 

In fact, when he finally moved, he woke me from a light sleep.  He lifted my chin toward his face with one finger, and looked into my eyes.  “Recovered?”

I was as well as I ever expected to be.  I nodded drowsily, running my fingertips across a long, shallow scar on his stomach.

“Good,” he said, and with a quick kiss to my forehead rose to gather his clothes.  “We are going to have a lot of work ahead of us now, so we mustn’t get too comfortable.”

I frowned and blearily pulled myself up to sit as he talked and dressed.

“I will report your success to the Black Hand, so we can have this blot cleared from our Sanctuary’s reputation.  Then I will have to come back and clean up the mess I’m sure you made, and _then_ I must see about recruiting people to fill in our ranks.”

My frown deepened into a scowl.  Recruiting people, also known as stalking and seducing strangers.

He went on.  “You, meanwhile, are going to have to fill all the contracts left unfinished by our fallen comrades.  I have already written them down and left them at a set of drop points for you.”

“Why not just tell me now?”

“Because there are a lot of them, and you won’t remember.  And they should not all be written down in one place.”  Now he went in search of robe and hood.

“So I will not see you again until…when?  You are doing this again.  Just enough to hold me in place and then you’re gone.”  I wanted to be angry and didn’t have energy:  it was only a defeated whine.

He shook his head at me.  “You are determined to always think the worst of me, aren’t you?”  He came back and took my face in his hands.  “I know that I am all you have now.  I know.  And you are all _I_ have.  Do you understand?  And it falls to me to rebuild our Family.  That is my duty to you as well as to myself and to the Brotherhood.”  He leaned his forehead against mine and thought for a moment.  “Do you need proof?  Take Shadowmere.  She is yours.”

The offer startled me.  “But Lucien!”

“You will need her speed more than I will.  Contracts are waiting.”  He gave me a light kiss and rose smiling.  “The first drop point is at Hero Hill, not far from here.  The contract would actually have gone to you, had other business not pressed.  I think it will improve your mood.”

He hurried me through getting dressed and sent me away ahead of him, telling me where Shadowmere was waiting.  She was as I remembered her, magnificent and dark, and strangely agreeable to going with me instead of her old master.  We moved out together in a blur of shadow, Lucien’s monsters.

 


	9. A Purpose to Serve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New contracts and an encounter with Jeelius, the Argonian she once rescued from the Mythic Dawn, reawakening something in Methusiele. But are the contracts legitimate? (sex chapter)

The first note filled me with glee.

_Go to Leafrot Cave, east of Bravil.  There you will find a necromancer in the process of trying to transform himself into a lich.  Celedaen has not finished the process, but he will still be quite powerful.  I am compelled to advise you to caution despite your experience.  Help yourself to his books, though:  perhaps they will be of interest to you._

_When he is destroyed, you will find your payment and next orders among the roots of the Great Oak in Chorrol.  May our Dread Father keep you in his cold embrace. – LL_

A necromancer.  A necromancer hiding in a _cave._   I would be able to use my neglected destructive powers, even my unique spells, and act openly:  no one would question my reasons for killing a necromancer!  I rode out with a song in my heart.

There was a peculiar comfort in stealing down into the cavern where Celedaen was hiding, a delight in finding that he had summoned undead things to his defense.  I mowed them down with joyous abandon.  And Celedaen himself – yes, a glance confirmed my thought from his name, a _self-important Altmer_ – fell more easily than many of his kind, a slight disappointment but no less satisfying to my sense of righteousness.

And that, perhaps, was a mistake on Lucien’s part.  As a short-term way of cheering me, it was an astounding success:  but the ashes of the part of me that had been Tavi seemed to stir, and to ask me in whispers what had become of my dignity and my purpose.

There was no help in that, of course.  Even if I could have found some new purpose outside of the Brotherhood, I had already killed a great many people in its service, and the oath in any case was not revocable.  And my whole purpose had been to destroy Tavi and then Methusiele, so her reawakening was not desirable.  I choked her back into silence as best I could as I rode to Chorrol.

The next assignment was not as pleasing:

_Well done.  Your next contract requires you to eliminate the entire Draconis family, including Perennia and all four of her grown children: Matthias, Andreas, Sibylla, and Caelia.  Only the mother’s whereabouts are known – she is on the Applewatch farm west of Bruma.  I suggest you get her to reveal the locations of the children before you kill her._

_Your next contract will be waiting in the well in the courtyard at Skingrad.  Go with our Mother’s blessing. – LL_

I wondered whose contract this had originally been.  Gogron’s, maybe – a whole family.  On the other hand, information gathering sounded more subtle than would have suited him.

Happily, “west of Bruma” was not the same thing as Bruma proper:  it was not near enough to cause any unpleasant grumblings from Tavi.  The old Draconis woman lived on a remote farm alone with her dog, and there was no other dwelling around for miles.  Good, that would save some effort.

She greeted me warmly and approached as if she’d expected me.  Started babbling about the service she’d ordered, and the _list_ , which she pulled out of a pocket on her apron.  I scanned it and had to stifle the chuckle.  It was a list telling exactly where each of the children were, and what kinds of presents they would like.  She was expecting me to shop and deliver packages for her.

Of course, that meant that there might well be someone else coming soon, so I decided to work quickly.  I stabbed her, and also had to stab the dog because it defended her.  That felt a little odd, so I distracted myself by riding off a short distance and returning my attention to the list.

Two of the four children were in Leyawiin.  I’d started to associate that city with trouble as well as rain:  I felt that my works there had a tendency to go wrong.  I would have to be careful.  One was a crazy woman living in a cave back near Cheydinhal – she wasn’t a cultist or a necromancer, it didn’t sound like, just a recluse. 

The last was in the Imperial City.  Damn.  I decided to do that one first and have it out of the way.  And in Talos Plaza, too.  The western side of the city, the more problematic side.  Wonderful.

Once there, I spent a bit of time in Talos Plaza, locating the house and noting its points of entry.  I went to the Foaming Flask to eat, and as I went inside, a rough Argonian voice called out my old name with enthusiasm.  Jeelius, the priest I had rescued from the Mythic Dawn when I’d gotten the _Mysterium Xarxes._   So long ago.  He offered to buy me lunch, and I accepted.

He didn’t ask what I had been doing since I’d seen him last:  that was a matter of public record, at least the parts I wanted anyone to know.  He had been working at the Temple of the One, which was flourishing in a city with newfound religious fervor.  It was becoming something of a place of pilgrimage.

“Why don’t you come to a service while you’re in town?” he asked.

I slammed down my drink and frowned at him.  “Surely you understand that I can’t.  I can’t go to the place where – ”  I stopped myself short, and dropped my eyes.  “At any rate, I am not on speaking terms with Auri-El.”

He placed a hand over mine.  “I do understand.  You are always in our prayers.”

The city was starting to work its dreadful magic on me, and for just a moment it was so easy to imagine Martin’s hand, and how his eyes flashed and his voice trembled when he was desperate enough to be angry.  _You’re drowning!  If you would_ once _allow someone to help you –_

Then what?  I dared the ghost of my memory to finish the thought, furious.  Then what would happen?  Could Jeelius bring people back from the dead?  Could he make Lucien let me go?  Could he erase an oath to Sithis?  Could he rework the very fabric of my _soul?_

No?  Then there was no help that he could give me.

Curse this city.

I pulled my hand away and rose to my feet.  “Forgive me, Jeelius.  I have business to which I must attend.”  Then I left the concerned Argonian behind me.

I killed Matthias in his sleep that night and fled the place I had come to hate, making my way toward Leyawiin.

It was raining.

Andreas ran a little inn outside of town.  No one seemed to be there except for an officer of the Imperial Legion.  Andreas himself was a bit of a drunk, and brief interaction revealed him to be a volatile one.  I insulted his manhood and he grew belligerent, drawing the soldier’s attention.  I leaned in and whispered that I’d seen his mother die and he flew at me in pure rage.  I blocked his attacks without returning them, and the soldier dutifully stepped in and killed the man for me.

Caelia was going to be more of a problem:  she was actually captain of the city guard.  Wait… no.  That was going to be perfect.  I approached when she was not particularly close to any of her fellows, whispered to _her_ that I’d killed Adamus and had come to kill her, and fled to the Mages Guild, where my guild mates were horrified at her assault and defended me.  She was no match for half a dozen mages.  They shook their heads and said they’d always suspected the city guard was out to get me, and that they would make sure to tell anyone who asked how it had really happened.  Even Dagail remained scrupulously silent.

Sibylla was hardly worth mentioning.  She was so feral that wild beasts lived in the caves along with her and paid her no attention.  I killed the lot, and brought the animal skins back to sell in town.

I didn’t like going to Skingrad, and particularly didn’t like going close to the castle, because Hassildor always made me nervous, but I went and retrieved my next orders.

_Your next target is a Khajiit noble named J’Ghasta:  his home is in Bruma.  He turned down a marriage proposal for insufficient dowry, and the girl’s family has procured our services.  J’Ghasta is very skilled in unarmed combat, and has also bribed the local guards not to interfere in his fights.  Be cautious.  The next contract will be under the Old Bridge south of the Imperial City. – LL_

He had never bothered to explain the reason for a contract before:  I wondered what made this one special.  Well – there had been the one early on that Vicente had told me was a pederast, but that might have been something he’d invented for my benefit.  The marked reference to guard interference made me suspect that Lucien was keeping track of the other contracts after all, which made me feel a bit less neglected.  On the other hand, he still stubbornly refused to acknowledge my special repulsion for Bruma.  At least I would not have to go into the Imperial City proper for my next assignment.

J’Ghasta lived just down the street from Tavi’s memorial house, past the Tap and Tack.  I found him in his basement, practicing his hand to hand fighting skills against bags.  I had decided not to use spells against him in a city whose Mages Guild had not yet recovered from other wounds, but the sword kept him at a comfortable distance just as well.

The next note flattered me a little:  _You are a useful tool indeed.  Let’s see if you can continue to impress me._   Now I was to hunt down a mass murderer, an Argonian named Shaleez, in the Flooded Mine near Bravil.  A virtuous kill, then, if rather ironic:  and also refreshingly straightforward, since against a criminal within a mine, I was free again to use my destructive talents.  They felt better every time I used them.

The contract after that, however, was against another destructive mage, so I would have to be more subtle.  Alval Uvani, this one, and the issue was a bad marriage.  Why Lucien continued to furnish the excuses for the kills I didn’t know, since Vicente and Ocheeva had long since given it up.  Perhaps he wanted to be particularly careful of me since the Purification.  Alval was Dunmer, and had a severe allergy to honey.  I found him in Bravil, invited him to drink with me, and “accidentally” ordered us mead instead of ale. 

The drop after Alval was back in the accursed Imperial City, in the Market District.  I took the bridge from Weye and circled clockwise, as always, avoiding the district that caused me most offense.  The atmosphere had returned to what it had been before the talk with Jeelius:  sad, watchful silence.  I was grateful for small favors.

Now Lucien was “only too eager to indulge my homicidal instincts,” which amused mildly.  On Gnoll Mountain, east of Bruma – Bruma again! – was Havilstein Hoar-Blood, who had killed a Nord chieftain.

…Odd.  The usual Nord custom among their own was to demand payment in restitution, not blood.  But the sister of the victim wanted this man dead.  It was not my place to question the order.  Again I was dealing with a criminal out in the wilderness, and could prevail on my older skills without fear of notice.  I chose fire, out in such cold.

The next drop was to be back near Cheydinhal, in Nornal.  An Ayleid ruin!  Such grand indulgence!  And the note was peculiarly full of enthusiasm:  _My compliments on another job well done!  You must not stop!  You must kill again!_   Ungolim, a Bosmeri archer in Bravil, was enamored of another man’s wife, and the jealous husband had ordered the contract.  I was to find Ungolim on his nightly visit to the statue called the Lucky Lady, to which he had been praying for the affections of his intended.  I was advised again to be cautious, as he was an archer of great skill.  And like J’Ghasta, he had an understanding with the city guard not to interfere in his fights.

This required some thought.  Was it necessary to cover my tracks in Bravil?  It was not a very civilized place.  Then again, if my hand was seen in his death, his desire for a married woman was not going to be seen as much reason for the Arch-Mage’s involvement.  Would rumor of my violence spread past Bravil, or would such a rough people simply look the other way?

I need not have thought too much about it.  I arrived in Bravil after dark and decided to watch him at the statue while I made my decision.  Ungolim was there – already alert, and aware of how to spot someone under a chameleon spell.  He fired on me immediately.

Startled, I fell back on old instinct, throwing fire back at him.  Happily the street was empty, so even though my aim had worsened from lack of use, I hurt no innocents.

He had a well-trained eye:  he followed the trail of my fireballs back to where I was, and two of his arrows found me before I got the better of him.  I fell back between the nearby houses, cursing under my breath as I pulled the arrows and healed my injuries.  I hated it when they surprised me like that.

An arm I did not see grabbed me around the middle, and Lucien’s voice hissed into my ear.  “With me.”  Without another word he dragged me to a door in the building I’d leaned against, opened the door, flung me inside, closed us in together.  He plucked the ring from my finger before letting me go and becoming visible himself.

His face was full of fury, and he immediately grabbed me again and threw me against the wall with all his strength, then leapt onto me, his forearm pressing into my throat.

_“What have you done?”_

I’d completed my contract.  Like I was supposed to.  I couldn’t say it because of the pressure against my throat.

“The _Listener!_ ” he whispered, with an intensity worse than shouting.  “Have you gone mad?  You have violated _every –_ every Tenet – of – ”  He looked at the shock on my face, and his expression grew less wild, then bewildered.  “You don’t know.  You don’t understand what I’m saying.”  He drew back his arm a bit so that he was still holding but not choking me.

“What _are_ you saying?” I snapped.  “I’ve done nothing but what you told me to do!”

He was indignant.  “You think _I_ told you to kill Ungolim?”

I pulled out the drop note and showed it to him.  He snatched it from my hand and read it, and then fell back a step, pulled a hand across his face, and sighed bitterly.

“I see.  It’s not my doing but no less my fault.  I should have made sure you learned about forgery.”  He handed it back to me with a desolate look.  “It is not in my hand.”  He stepped away and started pacing.

I could not have heard that right.

“You have just killed the Listener,” he said.  “You have been killing off the members of the Black Hand.  Curse the day I gave you Shadowmere!  I would have beaten you here.”

“How…how many?”

“This was the fifth.  Before Ungolim you felled three Speakers and a Silencer.”  He continued to pace and to pull at his face and hair in frustration, and now he laughed a little.  “They can’t stand against you.  You’re too resourceful, too powerful.  And you were my idea.”

I was mortified.  “But they can’t think that we – ”

“They do not think that _we_ did anything.  They still think that _you_ are only following orders.  You were not here when this began.  But _I_ was.  And then _I_ recruited someone capable of doing this to the Black Hand.  They blame _me_.”  He stopped, overtaken by his anger.  “Why would _I_ try to destroy the Brotherhood?  It is all I know!”

A peculiar line of thought came to me.  Destroying the Brotherhood.  Well, now, after all, it was Lucien who had first set me against my own.  I had only inadvertently carried on with the cleansing, gone on killing the killers.

Ought I really to stop?  Or could I flatter myself that I had not fallen quite as far as I’d thought, that this was even the purpose for which I had pretended falling?  Could I pretend that I was still a Blade after all, a spy infiltrating and burning one more evil nest?

I couldn’t, quite.  In a corner of my heart Tavi sang it with an air of triumph, but I remained too much Methusiele to believe her.  I was more capable of shame that I had been so easily tricked into violating the Tenets, the only law I had left.  All that remained to me now was anarchy.

No, there was still one step between me and that end.  I could be faithful to my own Speaker, to the man who had kept me alive by keeping his teeth dug into my flesh.

“What can we do, Lucien?” I asked quietly.

He took a deep breath to bring himself back under control.  “Where does it tell you to pick up the next assignment?”

“Anvil.”

“You must go.  You must find out where these orders are coming from, and bring the evidence to me.  I will wait for you at Applewatch.  That was your last real contract, and perhaps it is remote enough to be safe.”

Remote enough to be safe – yes, because the tattered remnants of the Hand would be looking for him.  That was alarming.  “What… what will you do if they find you before I do?”

He smirked.  “I will attempt to reason with them.  I will attempt to delay them until you arrive.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you will find me dead.”  He waved off my look of horror.  “I will not violate the Tenets, Methusiele.  Not even to save my own life.  I told you, it is all I know.”

I didn’t understand him.  I had never understood him.  I put a hand to his face, perplexed.  He raised his own hand to keep mine there and then kissed me deeply.  As I responded, he grabbed me to him tightly, the kiss growing desperate.  Abruptly he pulled his face back from me and caught his breath.  “Further from the door,” he whispered.

Before I could comment, he grabbed me by the hand and led me upstairs, where we found a bedroom.  “Stay quiet,” he urged as his hands sought out the fastenings for my robe.  “We must hear it if someone tries the door.”

“If they’re that close behind you, you should go.”

“I will.  After.”  Another fervent kiss as he pulled my robe down from my shoulders.  He started opening my shirt, and I reached up for his hood.  He sighed and licked at my lips as it fell away.  We stripped each other between mad kisses until we were both naked:  then he threw me to the bed and climbed on top of me immediately, renewing the kiss again.  His hands pressed demandingly as they sped up and down my body:  I stifled a moan as his head dropped to let him suck at my nipples and pull at them with his teeth.  He grabbed at one of my thighs and brought it up beside him as he moved into place to take me. 

His breath had grown loud and jagged, and he smothered his own noise in the side of my neck as he thrust into me.  He pumped hard and fast from the moment he entered, pulling my leg up as high as it would go for the angle he wanted.  He reached down to tug insistently at the other leg, and I brought it up as well, whimpering as quietly as I could manage and digging my fingers into his back.  He growled in satisfaction and looked briefly into my eyes, dark fire in his.  He started to kiss me again without closing his eyes, stifling his own gasps as well as mine.  He went harder still, clawing at my haunches as if trying to pry me even further open, as if he intended to get as deep inside me as I was within myself.

He hissed and his eyes went wild as he came, the spasm through his body making him dig his fingers into my flesh.  He went still for a moment, twitched again and gasped, then slowly relaxed over me, his head resting on my shoulder.  We lay there for just a moment, and I listened to his breath slow back to normal as he slowly ran his hands over me.  As soon as he was calm, he rose and started to pick up our clothes.

“Go at once,” he said.  “Do not wait until you think of your excuse.  Think of it on the way there.  I will be at Applewatch.”

I accepted the pieces of clothing he tossed to me and started to put them on.  “Do you want Shadowmere back?”

“No.  I am going to one place and staying there.  You are gathering vital information and bringing it to me:  you will have more need to be quick.  Keep her.  Now – now listen.”  He stopped, still shirtless, and faced me for a moment.  “You were tricked, and this is not your fault.  Whoever fooled you has fooled everyone in the Black Hand.  If you do not find them in time to save me… then that is still not your fault.  But find them, and avenge me and the rest of your Brothers and Sisters.  And then accept no further blame for us.  Do you understand?   That is my order.”

I had never hoped to hear another noble _whatever happens now_ speech.  This was not one to break my heart, but I tasted gall.  “I understand.”

 


	10. In This World of Shame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fall of the traitor to the Dark Brotherhood, courtesy of Mephala's most popular rental daedra.

Anvil was in an uproar when I arrived, and at first all I could determine was that people were happy I had “arrived so quickly.”  And that they were greeting me not as “Arch-Mage” but as “Champion.”

I almost panicked.  No.  No, no, no!  Not that!

But I regained my reason quickly.  The sky was still a lovely pale blue, cool with breezes from the sea.  I collected my wits and asked one of the city guards for the story.

The priests in the Chapel of Dibella had been murdered and the church itself defaced.  The investigation was going nowhere, and some crazy old hermit had come into town and taken up residence in the garden next to the Chapel.  He was babbling about the threat to all mankind, and the mood was spreading throughout the city: those who believed him were calling him “the Prophet”.  I agreed to take a look for myself.

They had not even cleared away the bodies yet:  one even lay sprawled across the central altar, broken.  But what shook me deep was the writing scrawled in what seemed to be blood, in letters no one else in Anvil was equipped to read, because they were Ayleid.

_By the eternal power of Umaril, the mortal gods shall be cast down._

My blood boiled, and my head reeled with unbidden memory.  I knew the name of Umaril, the uniter of the bastard Ayleid kings against the revolution.  He whose progress I had come into being to slow, until…ah, yes.  Until Pelinal had cut me down, right along with everyone else in the city I had failed to flee in time.  Pelinal who had been – I recalled this now from the talk with Alberic in Chorrol and my reading long ago at the University – an aedric spirit incarnated to do the bidding of the Nine.  Who had slain me and Umaril, both daedric of origin.

What foolishness was this about Umaril’s “eternal power?”  He was ages dead.  And if he was not, then by Mephala, this time I would kill him myself.

I shook my head to stop the wild stream of alien thought.  There was no sense in my swearing oaths to Mephala, or standing here trembling over Pelinal and Umaril.  I was not Meth – wait, I _was_ Methusiele, but not in the sense that – I shook my head again.  That which was Tavi reawakened in me sang about the daedric weakness to shock, in the event that I might have another opportunity to take advantage of it.

Stop!

I was a Silencer in the Dark Brotherhood, here to investigate a threat to our order and hopefully save the life of my Speaker.  My oaths belonged to Sithis and the Night Mother.  There, that was who I was.

…And yet I dawdled as I left the church grounds, listening to the ramblings of the old man.  Listened with growing attention as he warned us that an ancient enemy of the Nine was rising again and would seek to destroy the church and its people, unless a champion came forward –

I already _was_ a Champion, after all –

…to find and take up the relics Pelinal had used and made holy, now scattered and lost.  The relics were the only vessels of sufficient sacred power to harm Umaril, and could only be wielded by someone pure of spirit and beloved of the Nine.  But who, he bellowed, was worthy enough to seek them out?

“No one,” I muttered, and turned to leave.

I didn’t notice he had stopped his speech until I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see him facing me.  “I know who you are,” he said, and the look in his eyes was so much like Dagail’s that I wasn’t sure which part of me he was claiming to recognize.

“Let me go,” I whispered.  “I am not the pure Crusader you seek.”

“And you have the humility to say so,” he smiled.  “Every would-be savior who has come to me so far has failed even that first test.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that it was not humility but knowledge of my guilt, but I was not sure I could make him appreciate the difference without giving much more detail than I intended to.

“The Nine forgive those who seek with humble hearts,” he went on, and fumbled in a pouch on his belt, pulling out a crumbled piece of paper.  This he pressed urgently into my hands.  “This map shows some of the wayshrines around Tamriel.  If you approach each of the Nine in prayer, they will wash you clean, and perhaps then they will see fit to guide you to the relics.”

Then I would be a “clean” daedric assassin.  There did not seem to be much use in that, but I nodded quietly in order to escape him.  Contented, he returned to his preaching as I walked away.  As I walked I pulled out the drop note that had led me to Ungolim, and without thinking much about it, I put the map into the bag in its place.

The next orders were supposed to be in a barrel, by the statue near the northern gate.  If I picked them up, I would know who the intended victim was… but I would have no way of finding the author.  I hid myself and watched instead.

At dusk, a blond Bosmer strolled near the little pond around the statue.  He tried to look casual as he went around behind it, looked deep into the barrel for a moment, and then walked away again.  I followed.

He lived upstairs above the smithy at the other side of the gate.  When we were safe inside, I made myself visible again and cuddled up behind him with a dagger to his throat.

“Was there anything good in the barrel?” I purred.

He was already gasping.  “Please don’t hurt me.”  He tried to crane his head to look at me.

I pressed in a little with the dagger.  “No, no.  Don’t turn around.  Just tell me what you were doing.”

“I… there’s a man.  He paid me to put some kind of note in the barrel, now he’s paying me to look once a day and tell him when it’s gone.”

“I see.  Tell me about this man.”

“I don’t know his name.  I… I think he’s staying out at the lighthouse.”

“Very good.  Thank you.  I am going to take my leave of you, then – do not turn around before you hear the door close, or I will kill you.”  He nodded, a slight but frantic motion:  I stepped back from him, put my ring back on, and left.

The lighthouse keeper was easier to persuade to cooperation through simple friendliness.  Why, yes, there was technically a room beneath the lighthouse that could be rented.  No one ever did, though, and he left it neglected most of the time.  Certainly I could have the key if I wanted to look at it more closely, although he apologized in advance about the smell.  He’d not yet cleaned up after his last tenant.

The cellar –

I had never seen anything like it, and I had spent much of my short lifetime dealing with evil cults and murderers.  Bodies of men and animals were strewn casually about, not even organized or laid out in the calculated way typical of necromancers.  Just… just left there at random, filling the closed space with the stench of decay.

Of course, perhaps I had left the lairs of my enemies in a similar condition, in that regard.

What I had never done was to create an altar for a severed human head, pickled to preserve its skin.  It was surrounded by candles and a book.

It was the journal of a mad person.  A man most likely, given the entry about the woman he’d loved, who had rejected him because of… this head was his mother’s, and Lucien had killed her on a contract.  He’d been planning his revenge against Lucien and the Night Mother herself for all this time… he’d been a member of Lucien’s own Sanctuary at some point, and had been sent away to be someone else’s Silencer.  He must be the one Lucien had traded for Gogron.  Unfortunately, the diary did not tell me whose Silencer he was, or where, and Lucien had never discussed the names of anyone outside our ranks.

Some pages were random scrawls or ridiculous yet gruesome poetry.

The madman also gloated at some length about how clever he had been in changing the drops and using me against Lucien and the Black Hand.  That was enough to move me past sickened to angry.  I snapped the book shut and brought it out of the cellar with me – this was the proof we needed.  In the hands of someone who knew the membership of the Black Hand better than I did, it would reveal the real traitor.

Shadowmere all but flew across Tamriel to the cold little farmhouse.  To my alarm, there were other horses tethered beside it.  More than one.

I leapt down and ran toward the door – and it opened before I could touch it.  Standing in my way was another Altmer woman, in the dark robe and hood of a Speaker.  “Ah, yes,” she said calmly.  “Methusiele, I presume.  Please, come in.”

I could feel the sparks dancing in my hands.

_Fifth Tenet,_ I told myself. _Hold._

She read my tension.  “We do not hold you accountable, Methusiele.  You are in no danger here.”  She stepped aside and waved for me to enter, seeming to think nothing of the carnage she made visible all over the floor – of the body hanging from the ceiling.

Lucien.  I was too late, as always.

It was no cool, professional kill:  it was clearly personal.  They had not murdered so much as savaged him.  Left him strapped up by his feet, partially skinned and in pieces.

Had he – had he still been alive when they –

I leaned against the door frame to steady myself.  I hadn’t quite loved him, had sometimes hated him, but he was, he had been my –

The fools.  The _idiots._  

“Did he resist you?” I asked, my voice almost even.

She sneered.  “He could not have stood against the entire Black Hand.”

In other words, no.  But that apparently told her nothing:  she assured me that we were all “safe” now from Lucien’s treachery, her face lit up with a degree of naïveté I would never have imagined could exist in the face of a Speaker.

Dead.  Not merely dead:  mutilated.  They had not waited for the proof.  They had ripped him apart like they were dremora, even though he was – well!  _Innocent_ hardly seemed an appropriate word, did it?  I chuckled helplessly.

“I am Arquen,” she told me.  “I am now the senior member of the Black Hand.  And as you were Lucien’s Silencer, you are positioned to assume his mantle as Speaker.  The Sanctuary in Cheydinhal is now yours to restore to glory.  Come, I will introduce you to the others.”

I let her lead me by the hand to where they waited.  The young Dunmer was Banus Alor;   Belisarius Arius, the older Imperial gentleman; and Mathieu Bellamont, the peaked-looking Breton.

One of them was the traitor.  Not Lucien.  The others were still in danger, more so now that they were off their guard.  But I was angry and shaken, and if none of them had the sense to ask me the truth of it I was in no mood to offer.  He’d been a viper, and the source of much of the wreckage of my soul; and yet, still, he’d been the only friend I had left in the world.  And now he was gone, just like everyone else who had ever gotten too close to me.  A fine daughter of Sithis I was making.  My shadow was his shadow.

I should befriend these last fool Speakers, including the traitor.  I could wipe out the Brotherhood itself with my friendship and never have broken the Tenets.

“It remains,” Arquen announced to us, “for us to petition the Night Mother for her guidance.  We are cleansed, but without a Listener we cannot proceed with our work.  We must ask her to choose from among us.  Let us proceed to Bravil.”

We were not cleansed.  As we went out to the horses – as I avoided looking toward the contorted remains – I asked Mathieu, idly, who had trained him.  He said it was against the custom for us to speak of it.

A run for the other horses was a canter for Shadowmere, and she and I arrived in Bravil comfortable and fresh.  It was already dark, an appropriate time to make the approach to the shrine – the same statue, it turned out, at whose feet I had slain Ungolim.  I was oddly embarrassed.  As Arquen called out the worshipful words of petition, the statue seemed to contort unnaturally, and with an awful scraping noise, it moved to reveal a doorway down into the earth.

We walked down into a crypt, the ancient remains of one adult and several children.  Awaiting us there was the ghostly form of an old woman.  She waited until the door was closed behind us before she spoke.

“Fools!” she cried.  “You come to me unclean!”

I liked her.

“Night Mother,” Arquen protested, “we have eliminated the traitor!  We ask you to choose your new Listener.”

“I will not.  Lucien Lachance was faithful to me, faithful unto death:  he will sleep peacefully in his Mother’s arms.  You have brought a traitor into my presence.”

At that, Mathieu shrieked and started slashing at the other Speakers.  They were strangely ineffectual against him, perhaps too unaccustomed to resistance.

…Did I hesitate?  Did I wonder why I should save them?

Banus fell first, and then Belisarius.  I stood and did nothing, as did the Night Mother.  I might have let him have Arquen as well, but the fool came after me next, instead.  He was ill prepared for the likes of me.

Ill prepared.  I panted and snarled over the body.  Unworthy of being the architect of Lucien’s death.  Unworthy of the Cheydinhal Sanctuary.

“Excellently done,” Arquen murmured.  “I see why he thought so highly of you.”

I turned to stare at her, and considered the ramifications of going ahead and killing her myself, right in front of the Night Mother.  After all, she’d been a party to – no.  His last order had been to avenge us against the _traitor_ , and then to do no more.  I would spare the last of his killers in deference to his own request, as distasteful as that was.  I would obey the Tenets as he would have wanted.

As Arquen marveled at Mathieu’s smoldering remains, the Night Mother beckoned me forward.  “You have done both of your Mothers proud,” she smiled.  “You are everything that Mephala promised.”

I said nothing.  No appropriate words presented themselves for what I was feeling.

“Yes, child,” she said.  “I allowed you to be used to destroy my Black Hand.  I did not expose the traitor.  I have known of his intentions forever.  I will not deny my embrace to those who died faithful to me, but they were fools not to see him, and I do not reward foolishness.”

I found myself in agreement.  I did not regret them.  I felt no pang of guilt for the deaths of people who had done so much killing themselves, who had left the body of one of their own broken and flayed so far beyond the bounds of necessity.

She smiled to see the sentiment in my heart, and told me that she chose me as her Listener.  She began to describe my duties, how I would come to her and let her whisper the names of the doomed to me – “but let there be no dishonesty between us now,” she said.  “The peace of Sithis cannot be yours in full.  You have felt by now, I am sure, how your soul’s daedric essence replenishes itself.  I cannot undo your nature.”

I reeled, denied the only reward I wanted even as she praised me.  Denied forever.

This would never be over.  I could kill everyone in the world, and it would not be over.  I would move past mortals to the daedra, past them to the Daedric Lords – shatter Azura’s useless mirrors and shred Mephala’s tangled webs, linger joyously over the broken bones of Dagon – and by then my thirst for annihilation would be unquenchable, and Sithis himself I would have to swallow whole.

And once I had devoured Death, how would I kill myself?

There was no way out.  And thus there was no point to any of this, at all.  I had killed all those people, defiled myself and the memories of everyone I’d once cared about, and it had been for nothing.

Again the Night Mother intuited my thoughts.  “You do not mean to come to me for the contracts, do you, child?”  I did not answer, and she smiled.  “And perhaps that, itself, is why I chose you.  The Brotherhood should not recover that quickly.  It needs time to ponder the price of complacency and failure.  Let them long for my voice and not hear it!  Even in silence you serve me.  I am pleased.  Take what you will from this place, and go forth with my blessing.”

Apparently she could not give me the blessing that mattered, the one for which I had given myself over to this dark path in the first place.  I was lost.

 


	11. Cross the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of visits to daedric and godly shrines reveals that Methusiele/Tavi is not the only one who has undergone changes, and that possibilities may exist where she has not dared to seek them.

I wandered aimlessly for some days, as I had after the battle for the Imperial City.  I was adrift:  I was, as Lucien would have said, a weapon without a hand to control it.  No mortal agent remained to guide me; the Nine were lost to me; Sithis and the Night Mother, useless to me; the Daedric Lords already my enemies or too awful to contemplate.

All that remained for me was to finally take my grievances to her who had made me, and see what she would have me do.

I could already hear her chuckling with joy as I fell to my knees before her statue.  “Tintaviel!  It’s about time.  I told you, all roads lead to me.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Tsk!  Look at the wreck you’ve turned into.”

I dug my nails into my palms.  “I am what you made me.”

“Don’t blame it all on me.  _My_ Methusiele was a sweet, beautiful poison.  My Tintaviel was a wonder of fire and light.  _This_ mournful little thing is _your_ handiwork.”  She paused, and even in silence I could feel her smile.  “Still, you must have done well.  Every power that’s ever rented you is clamoring to buy.  Do you have a preference as to which offer I should accept?”

“Does it matter?”

“I am your Mother.  Of course it matters.”  Another pause as she regarded my skepticism.  “I see.  I am a Daedric Lord, so I have no love in me, even for my own creations.  Is that it?  The Nine and the Lords may be in different courts, but we are all deities.  We are all _whole._   That is what sets us apart from the lesser spirits.”

What was the difference between aedra and daedra?  Which piece was missing from us?

“Now, daughter,” she said, “tell me what you want.”

What a sick game this was.  “You can’t give me the thing I want.”

The ground itself seemed to shake with the peals of her laughter.  “Can’t I?  I am one of the great powers!  There is no realm to which my threads do not extend.  Not only _can_ I, little Tintaviel, but I have already _begun._   It’s so easy to get a rise out of Meridia – she’s never forgiven us for the Ayleids, poor thing.  The rest may be tricky, but we have opened negotiations.” 

“…We?”

“He is a clever boy, you know, with friends in both courts.  He is shaping up into an excellent diplomat.  It suits the nature of his main task, as I knew it would.  My collaborations with the Dragon always come out so splendidly.  First things first, now.  Give me that dagger the Little Mother gave you.”

My head was spinning.  “Little Mother?”

“Tsk.  Night Mother.  She’s little to _me_ , you know.”

I set the Blade of Woe at her feet, and in my mind’s eye I could almost see Mephala take it up and brandish it, switching it in turn to each of her four dark hands.  “I sever the threads that bind you to Sithis, the Night Mother, and the Dark Brotherhood.  I do not remove the bonds of our kinship, daughter, and I hope that one day you will be glad for that.  But I sever any other fealty you owe me beyond that first job you left unfinished.  You’ll see, that will work out in your favor anyway.  You are free enough to seek the patronage of the Nine.  But remember:  they already have thousands of sheep.  They’re _buying_ my beautiful weapon.  Before the end, you will have to show them how deep you’re willing to cut.”

I could feel something shifting within me, but I rose more dazed than enlightened.  Mephala knew more than any seer, and was less prone to speak down to mortal comprehension.

“The map’s still in your bag!” she called after me.  “Be Mother’s good pilgrim!”

What in the world – what map?  I stopped to rifle through my things and found it again, the map the prophet had given me, showing wayshrines of the Nine.  Showing the path to their blessing.

I still did not understand what they could do, even if they embraced me.  I had never heard of the sort of thing that would have to be possible.  But it was Mephala’s – it was my Mother’s bidding.  And a longing was awakening in me to be Tavi again, even though Tavi was loneliness and grief.  She was my better self regardless.

None of the wayshrines were very near me, but I knew that there were at least two on the Red Ring Road around the outside of the Imperial City, so I headed in that direction.

It was Julianos I reached first, the god of wisdom and the keeper of law.  I supposed that since I was something of a lawbreaker, it was right that I apologize to him first of all.  Actually my arrival there seemed to summon to mind everything I had done for Lucien, and I stood in horror for a moment, struck all at once by the enormity of my task.

I imagined I could hear Mephala laughing again in the back of my head.  _Yes, yes.  All that ridiculous guilt I have no use for – they adore that.  Give it to them.  Make it your offering._

When I knelt by the simple stones, I could not think of what to say:  but all the same, I felt a trickle of energy, a recognition of my presence.  It was much more subtle than what came from the shrine of a Daedric Lord, but then again, I imagined that I was much more attuned to daedric energies and thus more capable of feeling them.

I continued around the Red Road to a shrine for Dibella, the goddess of beauty whose chapel had been defaced in Anvil.  Another light touch, a little sparkle.

I was nearing the shrine for Zenithar, the workers’ god, when I encountered a knight and his squire.  The knight could not be bothered with me – I was not wearing any of my various insignia of importance, and so fell beneath his notice – but the squire told me that this was Sir Roderic, a war hero, making the pilgrimage to prove his worth to champion the Nine and avenge the insult against Anvil’s chapel. 

He seemed very confident, even smug – one of those who had “failed” at humility, I supposed.  I wished them luck.

After Zenithar’s little glimmer of interest I moved on to Stendarr, the merciful one.  The one I had scoffed at while performing my one bogus murder in Chorrol.  Appropriately enough, he appeared to forgive me.  That actually began to cheer me a little, though it did not quite remove the burden.

I was becoming accustomed to sleeping outside, since I had stopped bothering to look for inns along the way.  All the time away from the cities did seem to be making me feel cleaner, less oppressed by all the violence of the previous months.

Kynareth, the goddess of nature, came next, and then Arkay, who among the Nine was the lord of the dead and the enemy of necromancy.  I expected awkwardness because of the former but felt, hoped, that we bonded somewhat because of the latter.

Akatosh.  Auri-El.  It was hard to kneel before him at the little shrine east of Skingrad.  I was still not sure I forgave him, even if he was beautiful and the creator and protector of the world.

But he was the first one who spoke to me, faintly.  The voice did not physically ring out of the stone as it did for the Daedric Lords:  it was more subtle, a whisper in the back of the mind.  _I accept you back into my service:  now you may complete the task your mother and I first set for you.  But there will be another of my shrines to visit before your circuit is complete._   I told myself I didn’t know what that meant, and rode on.

Talos felt the most distant.  Perhaps he had not quite forgiven me for abandoning the Blades.  Well, so be it:  I’d had cause enough.  But I whispered apologies to Jauffre and Baurus.

Last was Mara, the goddess of love.  From her I felt a more obvious touch, a wave of her satisfaction with me.  _You come with the reason that pleases me best.  Your reward waits at the Temple of the One._

But I had not the time to recover from that mortifying statement before I felt my awareness wrenched from my body and whirled up into the air.  Before me stood the ghost of a man taller than I was, and completely obscured by armor.

“I awake!” he cried.  “Does Umaril stir?  Does the demon walk again?”

Pelinal.  I remembered with sudden, sickening detail the image of his mace swinging toward me.  Pelinal.

When I did not answer, he paused.  “You?  But you are – ”

I snapped so as not to recoil.  “I am what?  Altmeri?  A murderer?  Whatever irony you think you see, believe that I have already seen it.”

“Methusiele.”

I curdled inside at the name I was doing pilgrimage to erase.  “I am here in penance to Auri-El.  Do with that as you will, Whitestrake.”

“No, no.”  Was this rippling how a ghost expressed discomfort?  “I cannot judge those who do penance, and certainly I cannot judge you.  Not after Alessia fasted for weeks to win me back the gods’ favor after I killed you.  I did not know any deal had been struck between Akatosh and Mephala for our aid.  You were just another Ayleid to me when I found you.”  He bowed his head a little.  “I acknowledge the debt.”

Too many strange, awful things said to me in a row.  “There is no such thing as a debt to me.”

He ignored this.  “Umaril is the servant of Meridia,” he said.  “She stands in a unique place between the aedric and daedric realms, and holds some sway over both powers.  She has given this blessing to Umaril, and he is renewed by her.  That is why he has been able to return.  You _must_ find the relics we had from the Eight – ”

“The Eight?”

He waved a hand impatiently.  “Talos had not yet ascended.  Find the relics we were given to fight him in our era, and they will give you a chance of defeating him in yours.  I cannot say where they all are:  it has been too long, and they have been moved too many times.”  He paused.  “The Helm may still be in Vanua.  Begin there.”

Vanua – that was an Ayleid name.  I thought I’d heard of it.  Not too far from the Imperial City.

Not too far from the Temple of the One, where I’d been charged to go first.  What had I allowed Mephala to do to me?

“Fight him with all your might!” he called as I began to sink back to earth.  “He is an enemy to men and the gods!”

I was back in my body with two tasks before me, one fairly comfortable and one twisting my insides miserably.  Which to do first?

_Tintaviel!_ Mara’s voice chimed in my head.  _There is no stain left on you.  You are high in Auri-El’s favor:  it shines out of you like moonlight._

A merciless choice of words on her part.  That settled it, then.

I _walked_ toward the Imperial City.  For the first day I brought Shadowmere alongside me.  On the second day, I tried to free her, deciding it was odd to keep her in my service if I was now supposed to be clean and holy.  She followed me, and I gave up trying to send her away.

I started shaking at Weye, and had to stop and stare out over the water for a while before I could proceed.  I could feel that _waiting_ energy already, the one I had always been convinced was my own grief.  Even knowing all that I did about shrines, about what the Amulet had been and the Temple therefore must have become.  I had always been a bit stupid when it came to him.

I walked down the road into Talos Plaza to its intersection with the ring road, my eyes cast down to my feet.  Then, for the first time in what seemed like forever, I turned onto the ring, to the right.  Toward the Temple District.

It felt as if the energy of the whole town shifted.  Lightened, and urged me forward like the flow of a river.  The whisper came in my head, and I was amazed.  When I wasn’t fighting against it, it was so obvious that the voice was not mine.

_Thank the gods,_ it said.

_Hmph.  The gods thank themselves, then?_ I thought.

_I do.  It is hard to lose the habit._

I made the approach to the Temple with eyes downcast.  Jeelius saw me coming – there, not quite everyone I had ever known was dead, after all – and approached with warm welcomes…then quickly saw my mood and fell silent.  He bowed his head and gestured my way back into the sacred space.

They had not rebuilt the dome:  the shrine remained out in the open air.  I looked at the pretty mosaic they had done on the floor, the flowers that had been brought in offering.  I looked everywhere else I could think of, except upward.  I was shaking again.

Here his voice was clearer, louder, although still not quite the physical sound that came from the shrines of the Daedric Lords.

_You stayed away so long.  I called, and you would not come._

I fought the sting in my eyes, clenched my fists.  “I was angry.”  Let them hear me talking to empty air.  Let it be said that the Arch-Mage had gone mad.  I didn’t care anymore.  “I was hurt.  To save the world, you abandoned me.”

_What else could I have done?  You were part of the world._

The trembling came into my voice as I spoke, and I rubbed at my eyes and forehead in a vain effort to calm myself.  “Have you seen which part of the world I am?  Do you know what stands in your Temple?  All the times I thought you – everything I – ”  I went silent, no longer able to summon either the words or the ability to speak without sobbing.

His voice was sad, but quite clear.  _It doesn’t matter.  You are here now.  You never changed my mind, Tavi._

I fell at the feet of the Dragon and started to cry.  I thought I might never stop crying.  I felt the warmth of his blessing enfold me, so much more intense and immediate than the others, and I wept the harder to feel his love and not his touch.  I laid my head against a marble pillar, pretending it to be his shoulder.

“Damn you, Martin.  You promised you would think of something.”

The power wrapped around me so thick then, like an attempt at an embrace.  _I have._

 


	12. All That I've Blessed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the Keeper of the Barrier at her back, Tavi sets off to gather the relics of the Knights of the Nine, which he assures her will gain them what they most desire. Unfortunately, Stendarr is ironically slow to forgive.

I slept on the floor of the Temple, curled up beneath the statue.  I heard periodic discussions of this by the door, but no one came forward to disturb me.

When I woke, I gave serious thought to telling Jeelius to administer vows to me and let me stay there.  Now that I had finally come back to this place where I could feel Martin around me, I could hardly bear the thought of leaving.

_You must_ , he whispered.  _We must complete this work.  It is not enough to have you in my Temple when you should be in my arms._   Another wave of heat, another attempted touch.  _You will come back and tell me how things progress.  It will be just like it has always been between us,_ he added with a laugh.

“With the one glaring exception,” I muttered.

_And that is what we must correct._ More heat, and then his frustrated growl.  _I miss you so much, Tavi._

“I miss you,” I whispered, touching the foot of the dragon statue because there was nothing else for me to touch.  “I hope that you and Mephala know what you’re doing with me, because I don’t.  But I will go to Vanua, and see where that leads.”  I walked out, reluctantly, past the pillars that ringed the outside of the holy space.

_I told you I would always love you_.

I looked back over my shoulder, almost smiling.  “I told you I would always come back.”

Jeelius was waiting by the door, a respectful distance away.  “You…speak to the Dragonborn?” he asked.

I supposed there was no point in denying it.  “Yes.”

“Do you hear him answer?”

“Yes, I do.”

He nodded.  “It is as I thought.  Of course he would make his consort into his saint.”  He watched my eyes widen in surprise.  “Was it a secret?”

“No.  No, I suppose not.  But…but we knew there would be limits.  As an Altmer I could not have been his wife.  His people would not have accepted it.”

He grinned, showing all of his sharp teeth.  “And you still worry?  I am an Argonian, and _he_ is a god.  I don’t think it matters as much anymore.”  He shrugged.  “You may come and go from here as you please, Beloved of the Dragonborn.  I will make sure no one ever disturbs your communion.”

No one had ever been as generous to me for as little expected gain.  I touched his shoulder.  “Thank you, Jeelius.”

Shadowmere had waited for me, and I accepted that she was still my horse.

The ride to Vanua was short, and the ruin itself unusual, in that it did not seem to be a protected shrine like so many of the Ayleid ruins.  There were no traps, even though there were the usual catacombs and some Welkynd stones.  The only bars to my way were gates and uneasy dead.

Halfway down into Vanua I found one body resting peacefully:  it bore a shield with a red lozenge, and a little diary with a grim opening:

_This journal is a record of failure.  My failure._

The body before me belonged, according to this, to Sir Amiel, who had been part of an order called the Knights of the Nine.  They had once retrieved and cared for some of Pelinal’s relics, but were soon torn apart again by rivalry and covetousness of the weapons and armor they had found.  Sir Amiel had been the leader and thus took the blame upon himself:  he had come here in search of the Helm in a last effort to restore the original spirit of his Order, after most of the others were dead.  The journal assumed that I was likewise a true believer looking for the Helm, wished me luck, and bade me take Amiel’s ring to open his abandoned Priory again.  In its locked vaults, it said, I would also find Pelinal’s Cuirass and could “claim it for my own.”

I did not think I would claim it for my _own_ , after everything I had just read about the bad ends of those who had taken that attitude.  But I had been charged with the task of claiming it for _use._

The Helm was no more difficult to acquire than any Ayleid treasure, and I pitied the old man who had failed to reach what was, for me, such a straightforward goal.

The journal directed me to the southeast of Skingrad, in the West Weald.  The bones of the Priory were still lovely – a build similar to that of Weynon, I remembered with a soul-weary sigh.  The chapel was on the other side, though, with an empty garden plot next to it.  I entered the chapel first, and could still feel a faint shadow of holy presence there.  I touched one knee to the ground and one hand to my head in a show of respect, then went to inspect the house.  This was empty and dusty, but still as sound as the chapel.  Its main difference from Weynon was some lovely stonework in the floor:  a circle of eight red diamonds around a ninth.

I’d seen the red lozenge on Amiel’s shield and on the ring I’d taken from him; and I’d been a treasure hunter for long enough to recognize the likelihood of a hidden door, especially as there was otherwise no way down to where most Priories would have had a cellar.  I looked for the little flaw where the ring would fit as a key.

With an alarming clatter the pattern collapsed downward in tiers, becoming a staircase.

The cellar was ordinary enough, including storage and something of a training area and armory for the Knights.  Through another door was the undercroft, which was the largest and most open I had seen.  In the center of the floor was another circle of red diamonds, and on the opposite wall, I could see the Cuirass hanging, covered with an old cloth bearing the single lozenge as its insignia.

Between us, the walls were full of crypts…and as I stepped forward, the spirits began to stride out from them.

I stood still, a light ripple of shock all around me, waiting ready for me to aim it.  But nothing more:  this did not have the feel of an unholy place, and I did not want to make initially friendly spirits change their minds about me.

“I am Sir Amiel,” said the one directly in my path.

Ah, yes.  “I found your ring,” I said.  “I have brought the Helm.”

That earned a smile and a nod.  “Still, I cannot simply allow you to pass.  It has been my hope that the Priory would be reopened and the Order restored, but that will take a worthy Knight.  You will have to defeat us all in single combat before we can give you the Cuirass.”

This was not about winning one trinket:  it was about winning the goodwill of the Nine, about serving whatever plan both Martin and Mephala – my Mother – seemed convinced would gain me my one real desire.  I bowed to him.  “As you like.  Am I granted my choice of weapon?”

“Of course.”

I purred as the full heat of my magicka poured to my hands.  “Call _Hold_ when I am to stop, then.”

I learned their names as Sir Amiel sent them against me:  Gregory, Casimir, Ralvas, Henrik, Caius, Juncan, Torolf.  I swigged down one healing potion after Casimir, one after Caius, two after Torolf.  They had clearly been worthy fighters in life, but they could not do the things I could do.

It felt good.  Soon it felt _magnificent._   The flow of power seemed to revitalize my spirit in a way that even the blessings of the Nine and my love had not, and to make me wholly Tavi again.  By the time Sir Amiel faced me himself, I was laughing.

Only after we were done did I reflect on the list of names.  One was missing that had appeared in the journal.  “Sir Berich is not here?”

Sir Amiel frowned.  “No.  We were never reconciled.  It is one of my deeper regrets.  But you are proven worthy of the Cuirass and of the Order.  What is your name, good Knight?”

“Tintaviel.”

“Then you are the inheritor and leader of the Knights of the Nine, Sir Tintaviel.”  As I arched an eyebrow, he added uncomfortably, “That is the traditional title.  It is… it is odd to pass the Order to an Altmer woman, given the history of Pelinal and our holy relics.  But perhaps that is, itself, a sign.  So be it.  Wear our symbol and spread our name.  Call the people back to the Nine.”   

I made the rounds for friendlier introductions, and one by one, the Knights revealed pieces of the story of their collective fall and the fates of the relics.  The Sword and Greaves had both gone with Sir Berich – they knew not to where.  Sir Casimir had once claimed the Gauntlets, but they had fallen from him when he struck a beggar in anger, and could not be lifted again by him or anyone else.  They were in Chorrol, he said.    Sir Henrik had retrieved the Shield but never got back to the Priory:  he had devised protection for it at Fort Bulwark but fell in its defense.

Sir Ralvas had died struggling to retrieve the Mace from the Chapel in Leyawiin – a test of faith, he said, that he repeatedly failed and still could not solve.  Sir Juncan had met a similar fate seeking the Boots at an outdoor sanctuary for Kynareth near the Imperial City. 

If I went after the Boots first, then, I could report back at the Temple of the One.  I approached the Cuirass – Sir Amiel and the others now stood aside – and taking out the Helm, hung it on the display rack above its mate.

Sir Amiel looked confused when I turned again, so I explained.  “These things were made for one purpose, and for one purpose only will I wear them.”

He grinned widely.  “Then you will succeed where we failed.  I am certain.”

To be honest, I didn’t feel I would need them sooner.  I had more enchanted items already than I could use, and did not carry most of them, let alone make use of them.  The Ring of Khajiit and the fisherman’s ring, and Nocturnal’s key, and a sword and robes I had enchanted myself.  Almost everything else I had secreted away in one or the other of my houses, depending on which “self” had won them.

It started to feel silly to keep them all, on reflection.  I made a side trip to Cheydinhal to go through my things there, a process rich with layers of ambivalence.  Over the course of a week I sold what I thought could be put to honest use and buried the rest:  not a graceful solution, but a relatively quick one. 

Although it was logical enough that Kynareth had an outdoor shrine instead of a Chapel, it also created an odd resonance in my head with the shrines of the Daedric Lords.  (All gods were _whole,_ Mephala had said:  they only gathered in different courts.)  The residing priestess was perfectly happy to tell me the location of the Boots:  I must go to the “Grove of Trials” and be tested.  She pointed me to a nearby clearing, and I went there and waited, feeling the open, clear sanctity of the place.

The bear arrived at dusk.  _The_ bear, larger than any natural beast I had ever seen, and quite consciously and deliberately moving toward me.  I stood and started to gather my power.

No.  It was the shrine of the goddess who ruled this creature:  I should try not to kill it here.  I shouted and clapped to startle it into flight, which was useless.

But then I felt the spiritual presence surrounding the animal, and went still.

It approached me, looked into my eyes – even with mine when it was on all fours.  It watched me for a moment, and I stood.  It raised one paw and gave a casual swat at my side, and after staggering to recapture my balance, I stood.

And then it turned and walked away from me, toward the rocks.  I heard stone sliding against stone, and knew that a way had opened.  I followed the bear at a respectful distance until I found the open door, and entered.

On a little altar, between two giggling but passive spriggans, were the Boots.  I took them and set off for the Imperial City, for the Temple, eager to run back to the place I had spent so long avoiding and feel again the flood of love and warmth there.

“I have three of the relics,” I told him, pressing my hands against the stone effigy.

_Good.  Then go to Leyawiin next, and do not go to the Priory first._   He added before I could ask, _You will see why when you get there.  But Zenithar insists that if I told you outright, we would be cheating.  We need to make all of the Nine happy – they act as one._

I stayed for hours, basking in his ethereal presence.  Other worshippers got as far as the door and were waved away by Jeelius with mutters about the Beloved, the saint.  Again, it was finally Martin who had to tell me to go.  _Be safe, my love,_ he said.

Leyawiin was _sunny,_ which was boggling.  In the Chapel was a warrior named Carodus who came straight to me with his head hung in defeat.  He’d already tried to win the Mace and failed, and guessed me another pilgrim come to make the attempt. 

“The priest told me that Zenithar’s gifts are founded in Kynareth’s,” he said.  “But I don’t understand what that means.  I don’t understand what I was supposed to do.  Perhaps you will do better.”  He pointed me toward the undercroft, where he said a saint was buried.

I found the right alcove and knelt – and reeled as the vision came, swift and sudden.  I was on a ledge in darkness, and across a bottomless abyss I could see the Mace in the distance.

Alone of my things the Boots were with me, the gift of Kynareth.  I put them on, and a faint path seemed to appear before me, a thin bridge of light.  I did not want to test it.  For all that I had courted the void in my time of despair, the sight of a literal void stretched before me was a terror now that I had purpose again.

Were all voids really one?  Were Lucien and Vicente’s souls sleeping somewhere in that endless blackness?  Would I fall past them if I missed a step?

But this was the way.  If I had run underfoot of Mehrunes Dagon for him, I could do this.

I slowly touched one foot to the bridge of light, and it held firm.  Slowly, timidly, I crossed to the Mace and looked at it closely.  Pelinal’s Mace ( _swinging into my chest, breaking my ribs_ ) – no, not his now.  Not the implement of my death but a tool for my deliverance.  Gingerly I took it into my hand.  At once I found myself back in the Chapel, still holding it.  I took a deep breath, thanked the gods, and returned up the steps.

Before I was through the door I heard the clash, the shouting.  Three golden warriors were attacking, and Carodus was standing against them, already hurt.

They felt like daedra to me, although they were a kind I had not seen, so I called lightning down on them.  It made disturbingly little difference.  Fire, then, and the Mace still in my hand, although I had always hated blunt weapons.  Happily I did better with it than I had any right to expect – one of the virtues of its blessing, I suspected.

When they were down and Carodus healed, I knelt beside one of the bodies and tried to think through my anger.  They felt like…like Meridia, I thought.  Of course Meridia, she who had favored Umaril.  That would make these – I searched my memory for the name from my otherwise useless study of conjuration – Aurorans.  Prettier than dremora, and happily quieter, but not more pleasant overall.

Carodus was apparently inspired by the whole incident.  He asked the meaning of my insignia, and when I told him, he asked to join the Order.  I was not entirely comfortable with the idea of having followers, but I supposed that was what “restoring the Order” would have to mean, allowing people to join it.  And he seemed capable enough.  I began telling him how to find the Priory, and then shrugged that off and let him follow me there.  It took days for us to get there, because his horse was distressingly slow compared to Shadowmere.  I dropped off the Boots and Mace, and went out again after the next two relics.

I was distracted on my arrival in Chorrol by a plea from a local shop owner:  her daughter, Dar-Ma, whom I remembered as a particularly friendly and cheerful Argonian, was missing.  She’d vanished in the middle of an errand to a village called Hackdirt.  I agreed to investigate, and quickly found that the whole place was run by some freakish, violent cult.  It gave me no end of joy to burn through the lot of them and free the girl.

When I returned to town and the Chapel, the Altmeri priest was happy to show me the Gauntlets, which indeed were immovable.  The priest, Areldur, also told me that a descendant of the failed Knight, Sir Casimir, lived there, crippled by the curse Casimir had called down on himself in committing unprovoked violence while wearing a holy relic.  The boy, Kellen, was an invalid.  Harsh, I thought, to inflict punishment on the knight’s blameless descendants.  Especially harsh from the god of mercy.

Areldur’s glance away was quick and subtle, but he was of my kind, and I knew how to read him.  When I pressed, he admitted that he knew what would end the curse and lacked the will to do it.  Someone else must take it willingly.

I had to think very carefully.  My purpose was to destroy Umaril, and for that I would need every ounce of strength, surely. 

…No.  No, my purpose was to win Martin, and to do that I must please the Nine.  I went to Stendarr’s altar and prayed to know his will, and the answer seemed clear:  this was the way to the Gauntlets.

I should have known I would pay for executing Dark Brotherhood orders inside Stendarr’s Chapel.

I went down into the room where they kept the young man, and as soon as I touched his shoulder he leapt up from where he’d sat on the bed, beaming with joy.  He laughed, jumped, ran from the room crowing.  I sat down in his place, more tired than I had ever been.  I cast spells on myself to relieve the fatigue, and found the strength again to stand.  I would have to work a whole fabric of such spells over myself regularly from then on. 

Areldur was astonished and humbled when I came up trudging up the steps.  He praised my selfless act, and then wondered aloud what kind of priest he was if he could not be so generous.  So I’d saved one man but perhaps ruined another.  Still, the Gauntlets were now the weight of any other like pair, and I brought them down to the Priory.

There I found that Carodus had been joined by the priestess of Kynareth.  She’d already been there for days, he told me, and was cleaning the whole place from top to bottom.  She told me her name was Avita, and told me how she had received orders to join us in a dream.  I agreed:  far be it from me to deny the word of a goddess.

 


	13. The Desired Constellation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tavi collects the rest of the relics, and an admirer.

Setting foot in the Imperial City had become a delight.  “Five,” I sang as soon as I entered the Temple, the sense of presence and bliss already wrapping around me.

He was glad of that, but dismayed at the price Stendarr had demanded of me.  He would continue to petition on my behalf. 

Again I slept on the floor while Jeelius warded away the onlookers, and my love and I marveled at how simultaneously beautiful and awful this limited form of togetherness was.  How the pain was at once smoothed because we could _feel_ each other and stirred back up because we could not _touch._   Again he actually had to remind me to go.

_But remember what we said in Bruma,_ he said.  And then, because I did not dare say it and guess it wrong, he repeated it to me.  _You are my wife, whether the world knows it or not.  If you are still willing._

I wished he could at least be tangible for one moment, so that I could throw my arms around him.  I had to settle for misty eyes and my usual kind of retort.  “If I were not willing, it would be foolish to do so much work.”

I learned on coming out of the Temple that this time, the people Jeelius was blocking were not only coming to worship but specifically to see me.  Some were still there, and they commented my presence cheerfully.  It was true, they smiled, I had refounded the Knights of the Nine and taken up a life devoted to the Dragonborn and the gods.  What a relief, after the horrible rumors that had begun to swarm around me, that I was proving anew my faith and my loyalty to Tamriel.  How horrible and misguided the people were who said I had fallen into darkness.

Yes.  Well.  I was better _now_ , anyway.

Fort Bulwark, the last known location of the Shield, was far to the southeast, near the border.  I knew when I met the first conjurer outside that it had been taken over. I should have known when I had to run back and forth between four different gates and handles to open the way I needed, that the whole place would be a mess of puzzles and traps.  Apparently followers of Julianos were even fonder of such things than Ayleids.

The fights with the conjurers and their daedra were enjoyable, except for the care I had to take with fatigue spells and potions.  I learned from notes I found among their things that they were aware of the Shield and were having trouble reaching it, and also that somewhere, they had a prisoner who was either dead or soon to be killed for refusing to help them.

After navigating a set of pressure plates that had to be triggered in order, I found his cell.  He was a statuesque Redguard with plaited hair, who stood and faced me sternly when I opened the door.  He thought he was bravely facing his death.

“I am not a conjurer,” I whispered.  “I am here for the Shield.”

“So are they,” he frowned, and would say nothing else.

At last I stepped aside and gestured him through the open door.  “I am not with them.  Look, you’re free to go.  You needn’t help me, just go.”

He stepped through, and when I did not stop him, his expression changed over to relief and wonder.  “Thank the Nine.  I am Thedret.”  He bowed and took up my hand.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably.  “Tintaviel.”

“I’ve heard of you,” he smiled.  “But never caught a glimpse.  I am saved by no less than the Champion of Cyrodiil!  I would never have believed that everything I have heard said about you was true.” 

I raised my eyebrows.  This sort of thing always made me uncomfortable anyway, and this hardly seemed the time.

My impatience seemed to remind him of that, at least.  “I was trying to reach the Shield myself when they captured me.  I cannot go forward with you, I’m afraid:  I have been beaten and half starved.  I would be useless to you in a fight.”

“Then go,” I urged him.  He had not released my hand.  “The way is clear behind me.  Here, I will give you some money for food and lodging.”  I pulled out a handful of coins, then considered that he had no way to carry them, poured them back into their pouch, and gave him that.

“Thank you,” he muttered, his eyes bright.  Touched, and perhaps not accustomed to charity.  “When I researched this place, there was a phrase I kept finding:  _When the eyes of the Guardians are upon you, Julianos will show you favor._   Perhaps it will help you somehow.”

I nodded.  “Thank you.  Go, before anyone comes from the other direction.”  At that, finally, he nodded to me and trotted back the way I had come.

The phrase referred to a set of statues that had to be turned to face the center of the room.  Before I could do that, of course, there were more conjurers to burn and traps to avoid.  Turning the statues opened a secret door that led to an even more obnoxious puzzle, this one revolving around someone named Rodgar and his various belongings.  It seemed to take forever, but eventually another secret door opened and led me, at last, to the Shield.

I sat there and rested beside it for a while before picking it up.  Even under my spells I was feeling weary, and feeling with especial keenness my knowledge that even though my love was no longer quite lost to me, he could not pass his hands over my aching flesh or hold me while I slept.  That made me feel even more tired, and it was some time before I regathered my strength and brought the Shield out to Shadowmere.

I also did not push myself to hurry back to the Priory, even though Shadowmere did not share my weakness.  In fact, I went down to Leyawiin first, the nearest city, crawled into the Mages’ Guild hall, and slept for days before going north.  When I arrived at the Priory I was greeted by a shocking throng of people.  Areldur had come down from Chorrol to ask me to let him join, as well as two Nord brothers who had heard of us all the way in Skyrim.  The Knights had started breaking ground in the garden plot, cleaned the house, and brought in furniture.

Leading the efforts as if he had always been there was Thedret, who dropped to one knee before me.  Unlike the others, he was not content to ask my permission.  “I owe you my life,” he proclaimed, “and I am in your service.  I will not be sent away.”

Oh dear.  “Not _my_ service,” I protested.  “We are the Knights of the _Nine._ ”

He grinned and rose to his feet, then began to report to me.  He’d sent for his own smith to come and serve at the Priory:  apparently he was a gentleman of some means.  Routines for combat training, dining, chores, and prayer had been established.  In other words, he was doing all the practical work of founding an Order that I had failed to do.  His chief regret was that none of us had been present for the _incident_ in Bravil:  the chapel of the goddess of love had been defaced with strange writing and the priesthood killed.

I dropped to my own knees, without Thedret’s grace.  I growled, but did nothing else as I felt the energy drain back out of me, sapped by mere frustration.  This was impossible.  I didn’t have a lead on the last two relics, and I was never going to keep up with the Aurorans under Stendarr’s curse.

Thedret leapt forward and helped me to my feet, then walked with me, supporting much of my weight.  He led me up the stairs to a private room and laid me on the bed.

“They told me about the curse,” he said quietly.  “How you go on with your quests, no stronger than I was when you found me.”

“Please don’t make so much of it.”

He nodded and left me there to rest, but had one of the others bring food and drink to me.

I spent an alarming number of days recuperating, although to some extent it was pointless.  Now that my focus on keeping myself going with spells had lapsed, it was difficult to gather the will to start casting them again.  Eventually Avita brought me potions, and those gave me the energy to come out and use her equipment to start making myself a reserve of them.  I started trying to establish the spells that kept me moving into my daily routine, to make them automatic to me so that I would not run myself to the point of collapse again.  I watched the Knights practice, leafed through the books they had brought, talked idly with some of them.  I dreamed of arms that could not hold me, and woke morose and lonely.

Interminable weariness that carried me no closer to him.  I should be out searching the world for the last relics.  Turning over every ruin in Cyrodiil stone by stone, if only I had been myself, if only I’d had the energy.

Through all this, Sir Thedret was particularly attentive.  I did not discourage him any more:  he was strong enough to help me up when I forgot to fortify myself adequately, and intelligent enough to discuss the works in our little library, and noble of purpose enough to remind me of my time among the Blades.  I did not remark on how he came to monopolize tasks having to do with me directly.

One evening he brought my dinner up to me.  I had stupidly gone to practice with the others without thickening my protective tissue of spells accordingly, and I was still recovering.  He pulled a chair up next to the bed as I sat up to eat.

“May I speak freely, Commander?”  He paused awkwardly.  “Tintaviel?”

“Yes.”

But he did not speak at all.  He took my hand and sat with it for a moment, and then he leaned in and kissed my cheek.

“Thedret – ”  He moved to my lips, cutting me short.

For one moment, it felt divine.  I had been going without this kind of physical comfort since Lucien, and Lucien himself had not been precisely _comforting._   I’d been alone –

Then I remembered why, and recoiled from the poor man.

“Do I offend you?” he murmured, not quite pulling away.

“No.  You are a fine man.”  I touched a reassuring hand to his cheek, and should not have:  he took it as encouragement and began to kiss me again, deeper.   This time I pushed him away with more conviction.  “What I mean,” I began again, “is that I cannot.  I am pledged to the Dragonborn.”

Now he did pull back, looking depressed.  “Ah.  You’ve taken a vow of celibacy.  I should have guessed as much.  I apologize.”

I thought, _Not celibacy, fidelity;_ but I did not want to have to explain the distinction, especially not if I had already hurt his feelings.  “You will have your choice of young women,” I said instead.  “But my destiny is already set.”

He nodded and rose glumly to leave me to my rest.  “I will not find her soon,” he said over his shoulder.  “One cannot see stars when the sun is shining.”

Oh dear.  I settled back into the pillow I was leaning against, and glanced skyward.  “If you are watching,” I whispered, “know that the Nord pirate has been repelled.”

The next morning I felt mobile again after a potion and my first round of spells, so I went down to breakfast with the others.  For that reason, I was there for the arrival of Lathon, Sir Roderic’s squire, who promptly threw himself on the floor in front of me.

He and Sir Roderic had finished their circuit of wayshrines, and Roderic had received a vision – not of Pelinal, but of Sir Berich, who had persuaded them to come and find his relics first, and thus free his unrestful spirit.  They’d been led to a cave up toward Bruma, where they had found themselves overwhelmed by the undead.  Sir Roderic himself had fallen to a wraith wielding what Lathon suspected was the Sword.

All the same, he said, he himself had escaped with his life, along with a prize he hoped would prove his intentions and persuade me to let him join the Order. 

He had the Greaves.

I had him put them with the rest of the relics, and then accepted his petition to join us.  And then told him to lead me to the cave where Sir Roderic had fallen.

“I’m going with you,” Sir Thedret said at once.

“You are not.”

“You need my help,” he insisted, eyes burning.

“The Sword is not our only task!” I snapped.  “Someone must keep watch for more news of the Aurorans.  Someone must make sure these people are ready for real combat when we find Umaril.  I need your help _here._ ”

He scowled but nodded.  “Then wear the holy armor.  I know you can feel the healing power that is in it.  It will help you keep yourself strong.”

That was certainly true.  I looked around at all the others watching us, and then slowly shook my head.  “No.  I told Sir Amiel that I meant to wear the armor only once.”

Sir Thedret glared at me, nodded, then pulled Lathon aside as I went to prepare my things.

Again the awful slowness of waiting for a horse that was not Shadowmere.  Days of riding.  We went up through the Imperial City, of course, and I made Lathon wait with Jeelius while I went inside.

“Seven,” I said, leaning into one of the pillars around the statue and letting it support my weight.  “I am so tired, Martin.”

_We’re almost there, my love,_ he whispered.  _When you have Arkay’s Sword, everything will fall into place.  The Prophet is already on his way.  Be strong for just a bit longer, and let your Order help you._

“They are not _my_ Order,” I insisted, but still forced myself to turn and walk back out to where Lathon waited, listening to Jeelius opine about the relationship between the Dragonborn and the other gods.

When we dismounted at the mouth of the cave, Lathon pulled down a satchel to bring with him.  I looked at him skeptically, and he produced a torch from it.

“Not good for sneaking,” I said.

“But quite good for seeing,” he countered, already lighting it.

“I want you to stay out here and wait for me.”

He shook his head.  “I have already been asked to refuse when you said that.  And leaving the Knight unaided is not the task of the squire.”

I wanted to scream _You are not my squire!_ but thought of Martin’s words and held my tongue.  Instead I nodded and said, “But stay behind me.”  To that he agreed.

The cave was actually the entrance to a buried keep, and the opposition offered in the cave proper was minimal.  As I investigated the three doors into the keep, Lathon shouted, “Commander!”

“What?”

He held up a bottle.  “Potion.”

I frowned in annoyance.  “ _What?_ ”

“For fatigue,” he said calmly.  “My instructions were to make sure you drank one at every respite, whether or not you thought to ask for it.”

Thedret.  I swigged down the potion and slapped the empty bottle back into Lathon’s waiting hand.  He smiled, fulfilled in his duty and indifferent to my mood.

The door in the middle, I decided.  But immediately the room on the other side branched three ways again.  This time I cleared the side passages first of their various undead things.  Though I could not bring myself to say so, I was grateful to both Lathon and Thedret for the steady supply of potions, which made the work tolerable.  – _Tolerable_ , when it should have been easy.  But there it was, Stendarr’s “mercy.”  I would have to make do.

Down the center next:  I had to hold Lathon back from walking into a cave-in.  Through another doorway, and Lathon led me silently – little point to that, given the _torch_ – down a way he had come from Sir Roderic, whose body lay in the little room where he fell, right next to the tomb marked as belonging to Sir Berich Vlindrel.

In the great flooded room beyond was the wraith himself.  I had been kept fresh by my assistant, and Berich posed me little more challenge than any other such creature.  I had the Sword.

It was, however, itself a problem.  He had tainted it somehow:  I could feel the evil seeping from the blade.  I would have to have it reconsecrated, and Arkay’s Chapel was in Cheydinhal.  It seemed like such a long way.

After I’d drunk another potion from Lathon, I told him to stay and arrange for the transport of Roderic’s body to wherever he would have intended to be laid to rest, and of Sir Berich’s body to the Priory, where he could be reunited with his brothers in the Order as Sir Amiel had wished.  After the bones had been blessed and thus quieted by the first available priest.

I rode up to Bruma, where my own stony likeness greeted me, her eyes and her light lifted upward as if she’d known all along where she’d been headed.  I opened up my old house, disturbing the layer of dust that had begun to settle over the treasures from my best days.  Despite my impatience I forced myself to sleep there the night, to add that little token of physical recuperation to the pile of spells.

In the morning I sat at my desk with pen and paper and collected my thoughts, with a silent plea to Martin, to the Nine, and to Mephala.

_I think I can see the plan unfolding:  I think I can see the gift you mean to give me.  But I still do not quite understand it.  Help me to walk in the right direction._

I wrote a will, dispensing my things.  The staff of Indarys must go back to the Count of Cheydinhal, and the Imperial Dragon Armor be donated to the Temple of the One.  Almost everything else was to be sold, and the money to be used to help the ongoing restoration of Kvatch, particularly the Chapel of Akatosh.  Before I left, I made another set of potions to get me to Cheydinhal.

This city had its own set of memories now, not as painful as those of Bruma and the Imperial City had once been, but sad and awkward.

The doors of the Chapel were thick and heavy, and I did not hear the fighting until I had come inside.  Aurorans.  I ran in spraying fire – and quickly had to refocus to narrower blasts as I realized that there were human survivors in the room.  I had not been quite too late.

Two of the four residents of the Chapel had been killed, the others spared.  Benches had been knocked about, but the defilement had not yet been accomplished.  After the cleanup had begun, I offered the Sword before the altar and watched as its taint was bled away by Arkay’s power.

There.  That was all of them.  In theory, I was ready for my reunion with Umaril.  If I knew where he was.  If I could carry enough potions with me.

I mustn’t think that way.  There was a plan:  my Mother and my husband had promised me a plan.

 


	14. Post Nubila, Phoebus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Talos can provide what Tavi needs: the ability to exist in Aetherius. All she has to do is kill Umaril.

I told Jeelius of my wishes, and he agreed:  a saint’s relics would be an asset to the Temple.  The blessing of the Dragonborn flooded me, but the god I loved would not let me stay and rest this time.

_Hurry now,_ he said.  _All will be well.  I am with you – we are with you.  Hurry._

Sir Thedret greeted me immediately at the Priory.  “They are all in the chapel,” he said, “with the Prophet.  He wishes to speak with you at once.”

There he was, indeed, the old man, giving a sermon in our chapel.  My Knights surrounded him, along with one Bosmer I had never seen before. 

“I have come to serve Auri-El,” he whispered to me as I passed him.  I accepted him and moved forward to the Prophet, who beamed at me.

“I knew you were the one,” he grinned.  “The time has come, Crusader, and I have been sent with gifts for you.  The dreadful and unique power of Meridia is her access to both the daedric and the aetherial realms.  When Pelinal killed Umaril’s body, his soul was able to flee down a path no being but a god could follow – which is what gives him the arrogance to call himself a god.  Daedric fires reforged his body, and aedric consciousness retained his nature. ”

Mephala’s words leapt into my mind.  _All the gods are whole._   Even Martin, born mortal, then apprenticed to both the Daedric Lords and Auri-El –

“Pelinal carried the blessings of the Eight gods of that time, but they could not carry him to the fight against Umaril’s spirit, and that is why he failed.  But the times have changed.  Tiber Septim found the way of ascent and became Talos, and the Eight became Nine.”

I’d had words very like these from Pelinal himself, but had not understood then.  _The way of ascent._   My head was swimming.

“In token of the pleasure of the gods with your selfless service in their names, Talos has charged me with passing his blessing to you.  Call upon it when Umaril’s mortal form has fallen, and it will empower your spirit to give chase to his.  You will have to kill him twice, in body and in spirit, before he is broken forever.”

I fell to my knees to receive the blessing, and he laid his hands on my head.  It was a lightening power, full of brightness and air and –

And I wasn’t tired.  Stendarr’s curse was gone.  When the Prophet moved his hands, I fairly leapt to my feet.

“I have seen his lair in visions,” the Prophet intoned.  “He gathers his forces at Garlas Malatar, on the coast, far in the west.  Soon he will be strong enough to strike out in earnest:  you must defeat him before he does.”

I nodded, turned, and saw my Knights waiting for my orders.  My first instinct was not to take them:  I had always worked most efficiently alone, and it was quite likely some or all of them would be killed.  Now that I was vital again, I rather relished the prospect of clearing my own path through the Aurorans to get to Umaril.

Then again, after that would be Umaril himself – twice.  And I realized that this was not only about me and my love now:  these people needed to feel they had done something good for their world.  They needed a triumph that would allow them to carry on without me.

I struggled to make the words right:  in my various forms, I had typically spoken in either beautiful lies or ugly truths, and the combination of loveliness with honesty always felt awkward to me. 

“Noble Knights.  We go into battle against unworldly forces, and some of you may not return.  I myself may not.  But you will be defending the gods and their people.  If any of you are spellcasters, know that the weakness of the Aurorans is fire.  Focus yourselves on them, and I will press forward to find Umaril.”  I paused, allowed them to nod their agreement and approval.  “If I am among the fallen, I instruct the survivors to bear my body to the Temple of the One in the Imperial City.  That is where I have arranged for my interment, out of love for the Dragonborn.”  I paused again.  “Go and arm yourselves.  We will leave shortly.”

Sir Thedret left me last, of course.  “You would even be buried there,” he murmured.  “Then it is true what they say, about you and Martin Septim.”

“Yes.  It is true.”

He grimaced, but there was sympathy in his eyes.  “One cannot see the stars when the sun is shining.”

I smiled at him.

When I went down to retrieve the relics, the ghosts of the first Order were there to greet me and wish me luck, with an additional member.  “Your squire brought me to rest with my brothers,” Sir Berich said.  “You have erased the stain on me as well as on the Sword.  Thank you.”

I had felt my old self when the Prophet blessed me:  in the holy armor I felt nearly invincible.  The combined blessings interwove into another entire layer of protection.  I felt obligated to carry the Mace for its contribution to the effect even though I intended to use the Sword.

The ride west was excruciatingly slow – Shadowmere seemed agitated by our pace, and would sometimes canter impatient rings around the other horses – and we attracted gawkers.  I had no idea what they thought we might be doing, since although the Prophet’s words and rumor of the Order’s existence had both spread far and wide, that did not necessarily mean that ordinary people really understood the nature of the threat.

The sun glinted off of the sea and the white stone arches that led out into the water, a bridge to the Ayleid keep beneath – beneath the waves.  If the way was flooded, that would be a problem.  I didn’t have enough water-breathing rings for everyone, and my spells would be better spent elsewhere.  No, I thought:  if Umaril and his Aurorans were here, then Garlas Malatar was not flooded.  They needed air as much as we did.

My Knights rushed in and attacked the first wave of Aurorans as I sorted out how to get us through the usual Ayleid gates and doors.  Once the way was open I ran ahead of them, weakening the next wave with fire, laughing with delight as I crippled them for my people to kill.

So far, so good.  I stopped everyone at the door I knew would lead down to another level, so that I could heal them first.  Downstairs, there was another pressure plate-activated door.  Behind it waited the main force.  They were in a grand hall lit in rows of Welkynd stones:  in my remote past it would have provoked a gleeful avarice, but now it only revealed the hazard to my allies.  I threw fire until the Knights were too thick in the room for my ranged spells to be safe:  then I drew my sword.

We fought them, and I thought we were fighting well, although it still felt more like an impediment than a help to have other people there, blocking my line of fire.  At first the Knights held strong, the Aurorans falling steadily.

And yet time wore on, and we did not win through them.

Something was wrong.  My people were clearly tiring, and I myself had killed nearly as many Aurorans as I thought had been in the room, and there seemed to be no end to them.  I scanned the floor and saw that there were no bodies.  They were being renewed somehow –

I cursed myself for not having given it my attention.  High up on a platform above us was some other kind of glow, and a feeling of power that was neither quite aedric nor daedric – the power of Meridia. 

I forced my way through the battle, leaving my friends to fight the Aurorans, looking for the way up.  The steps were guarded, but even if I could not kill my enemies, I could put them down for long enough to pass them.  The glowing thing was an orb – glowing not red like those I had been accustomed once to steal from Mehrunes Dagon, but a soft white.  I plucked it from its perch all the same, and heard the roar of shifting energy around me.

It was not space that changed, but time.  The orb shattered in my hands but the shards scattered slowly and then stopped, suspended in midair.  As I looked down from the platform I could see the battle freezing beneath me:  Thedret about to cleave his opponent in two; Avita down; Carodus shooting wildly to cover one of the Nord brothers, who was downing a potion with one hand and clutching his bloody side with the other.

They stopped completely, and then they vanished from sight, and I heard a door open behind me.  The Knights of the Nine were beyond my help, but Umaril awaited.  I went forward.

The twisting hallway led me to a few more Aurorans before it opened out into the throne room.  There, atop the dais to which the standard mechanical steps were even now ascending, was the tall figure in what looked like especially fine Auroran armor, with peculiar winglike structures on its back.

Umaril the Unfeathered.  He screamed at me in our old tongue, mistaking me at first for Pelinal – then realizing that I could not be, laughing, assuring me I would share Pelinal’s fate.  He ran down the steps toward me, allowing me to see that he was more than a foot taller than I was and swinging a claymore.  I threw the Shield up between us, and sparks flew into his face as we clashed.  I fell back from the force of the blow, raised my sword and sang fire toward him.

He was a terrible enemy, but I could feel the powers of Pelinal’s relics humming, weaving together and brightening as if they had been waiting for this moment themselves, and together those powers and I pushed him back and slowly wore him down.  He fell burning.

I gave myself a moment to stand gasping over the body.  Not done.  I was not done.  I moved to heal myself by reflex, then laughed as I wondered what the point would be, if all was as I suspected.  Instead, I dropped to my knees and prayed for the blessing of Talos to take me.

Everything rocked and swam and went dim, and then I felt myself wrenched away from Mundus more violently than ever before, into a place of hazy light and cloud, not unlike where I had met Pelinal.  Only now it did not feel like a vision:  it felt real, I felt real within it – felt the strands of light and air that had been worked into every layer of my being.

Aedric energies had been woven through me.  The part I had lacked, the part whose absence had barred me from Aetherius.  That was my gift from Talos, and now there was no realm beyond my reach.  I was whole.

My laughter drew the attention of my fleeing enemy, who turned to glare at me from across a bank of clouds.  “By what power do you follow here?” he roared.

I roared back, a wordless howl of triumph and bloodlust.  By Talos:  by the wiles of the Dragonborn:  by the combined art of Mephala and Auri-El.  By right of thousands of years of waiting. 

I flew at him again, Sword raised, fire dancing through me.  The power of Pelinal’s relics had followed me and continued to hold against Umaril, continued to knock him back.  He cut me and it did not matter:  with a thought, the armor flooded me with healing.  I cut him, and he staggered, wounded by holy wrath.

Soon he was dead, and dead forever.

And I looked out over the infinite expanse of sky, the borderlands of Aetherius, free to go wherever I wished, and realized that I had no map to guide me through so vast a realm.  No idea how to begin to seek out the place where my love, my purpose for everything I had done, would be waiting.

What is the difference between aedra and daedra?

Methusiele would have despaired.  Tavi would have stormed off in a random direction to see what that gained her.  I knelt, closed my eyes, and prayed to be guided home.

 


	15. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Procession of the Bride.

The voice that is my eternal desire whispered to me.  “Open your eyes, my love.”

I did, and screamed.

I was in the undercroft of the Priory of the Nine, laid out in state, a ring of candles all around me.  Alive.  In the Priory.  And, oh, outraged.  I rose from the stone shrieking and tore the Helm from my head.

It is said that Thedret, who became head of the Knights, was the one who found me.  That is true.

There was awful clatter on the steps, and Thedret clamored into view, and stared at me.  It is seldom possible to say that a Redguard has turned pale, but he did.  He opened and closed his mouth twice before sound would come out.  “By the Nine.  Lord Crusader.”

I checked myself from throwing the Helm at his head, but my voice came out in a roar.  “ _You were told to take my body to the Temple of the One.”_ How odd the sound of my voice was, wide and fierce in this hollow air.

“But…” he gaped and stammered some more, dumbfounded.  “We only meant to hold vigil before we – there hasn’t been time to…you’re alive!”  Finally he began to build the explanation in his head.  “It is a miracle!”

I strode with quiet fury to the stand where I had told them to keep the armor when I was gone, and hung the Helm in its proper place, then began to remove the Cuirass.  _“You were told to take my body to the Temple of the One.”_

I could taste his fear, behind me.  Alive and mad, he was thinking.  Mad like Pelinal.  This was not inappropriate, and not worthy of my further notice as I shed the remainder of the armor and turned, now in only the sackclothes that went underneath armor, not unlike the sackclothes with which I had been sent into the world.

He tried to approach.  “Tintaviel – ”

I rounded on him again, tried one last time to make it clear to him, in small, mortal words that would not destroy him.  “ _The sun is waiting, and you delay me here._ ”

It is said that I shone with a golden light and that my eyes were green fire.  I would not know.

His eyes glistened, but he nodded, then ran up the steps ahead of me, gathering the Knights, proclaiming the miracle.  Blessed by Auri-El they were, that they did not block my path as I walked out and away from the Priory in the direction of the Imperial City.

They took it for a pilgrimage, as in a sense it was, and followed.  They said the pretty words of faith to each other that they did not understand, and to those we passed, and some of those joined our train.  They wondered, and tried not to complain, that we did not stop to eat, to rest, or to sleep. 

The Imperial City was singing and alive with light for me; I could see the protective veil over Mundus emanating from White Gold Tower, and over the Temple District there was a shimmer in all colors, drawing me forward.  I could hear the voices and the thoughts of the swarm building behind and around me, names and titles that had lost their meaning.  I walked faster.  My focus was no longer on them but on the real City beneath and beyond their grasp.

The Temple of the One was crowned with flowers that bloom in no world known to man, and its door stood open, and the rich warmth of the only voice that matters poured over me from within it as soon as we approached the circle in which it stood.

“Tavi.  Even at the last, you make me wait.”

Cries and wonder.  They could hear him.  What they saw step out of the dragon, I cannot say:  to me the statue was becoming only a vague shape in darkness.  My eyes were on the man in simple priest’s robes whose blue eyes were bright with joyful impatience, who came as far as the door and then waited at the top of the steps with his hand offered because he had learned enough dignity not to run.  I ran to him instead. 

He touched my cheek first, and we stopped to feel it.  It was real, it was true.  He beamed as if it was too good to believe as I raised my hand to meet his.  He grabbed me to him never to be parted again, and his lips burned against mine.  He kissed me and the last sight of Mundus dissolved into nothing.

It is said that Tintaviel walked out of the Priory of the Nine alive and went to the Temple, and there was carried by the light of Akatosh into the heavens.  Do not believe.  She was illusion, the shadow cast by the last eager steps of the bride to the altar.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to Twist Shimmy for beta


End file.
